Reflection on web conferencing and Green Eggs and Ham

I came home from class last night to one sick kid and another kid who wanted Green Eggs and Ham read to her. Luckily, I have a domestic partner (who usually has both kids tucked away in bed asleep when I get home). He took on the tummy ache, while I tackled the umpteenth reading of Dr. Seuss' book.

from ManyEyes

I'm spending too much time with this EP604 stuff because, as I was reading the story aloud, I couldn't help but relate issues of digital tools, collaborative research methods, and alternative forms of representation to Sam's persistent and steadfast pursuit of that curmudgeonly "other" guy. 

Just, "Try them! Try them!"

Thing is, sometimes I am Sam, and sometimes I am that other guy.    

In the days leading up to our demo session in Centra, which was last night, I was feeling a little like the "other." For reasons I hope I made clear in the second paragraph of this post, staying home in my jammies plugged into a router for four hours was not entirely feasible.  So, I packed up and headed off to my lonely, gray, ice-cold cubicle at the College of Education. Fun.

Online, collaborative workspaces scare me a bit. So many things can go wrong. And sure enough, over the course of the evening, my audio seemed not to work, my Internet connection failed, and my ears literally ached under my headset.  I was so tense after four hours of being plugged in, powered up, and logged in.

Minor constraints, I suppose, considering all that we accomplished in the virtual classroom: class surveys with instantaneous feedback, Internet "safaris," break-out and whole group discussion sessions that were nearly -- if not completely -- as effective as face-to-face.  

But the single greatest affordance of web conferencing I observed last night was how it can dissolve geographic and cost barriers that frequently prevent cross-disciplinary interaction and access to outside field experts.  Our guest speaker joined us from hundreds of miles away to provide a visual demonstration of her research process.  She also contributed insights and elaborated on her past experience in transforming research findings into a performative text.  I am pleased the Centra session was recorded because I hope to access it and listen to it again in the near future.  And that's another affordance.

The whole experience last night was a good example of teaching about and through digital tools in a safe, non-threatening way that stretched my thinking and pushed me out of my comfort zone (quite literally). 

The same theme carried over into the readings and examples provided on artistic and visual representations of research findings. To quote Woo (2008), "...[W]e should go ahead and challenge our own parameters to create possibilities that might not have been previously imagined" (p. 327). I realize she is speaking specifically here about winning over "traditionalists" who resist arts-based research, but her sentiment brought me full circle back to the broad mandates posed by authors of earlier articles we've read in EP604. As a student, teacher, and novice researcher I must acknowledge the implications of living and working in a digitally mediated society (Brown, 2002; Garcia, 2009).

Reflection on web conferencing and Green Eggs and Ham