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Thoughts about our Google+ chat and other thoughts :)

Jon G.- Our group began discussion about unique places in Indiana, and aside from tourism pages or specific sites for towns or counties, there is very little on the web which brings all that together. We concluded to focus on unique places in Indiana divided by region- Northwest, Northeast, North central, Indianapolis proper and Southern Indiana. I thought the Google+ Chat worked rather well, and although it was distracting to have the video chat change every time a different person spoke, it was a free, convenient way for us to interact. One shortfall, there is no transcript of the event if we had chatted in Oncourse, but I took notes in Microsoft Notes while we spoke, which was convenient. As I said before, it was free compared to Skype videoconferencing so that was a "plus" (pun intended). I think we were able to come to a consensus rather quickly to focus on unique Indiana places, and we wanted to include some spooky stuff, relative to the proximity to Halloween. I created a circle with all the people in our group on Google+ to keep track of changes and further collaborate and communicate w.r.t. this wiki.

From Holly: I liked using the Google+ for our collaboration. It was nice to be able to see reactions to what was being said, as opposed to some of the other options. In the chat rooms of Oncourse or using the Instant Messenger options, we are depending on being able to interpret emotions and feelings on what, the speed the words show up on the screen? Yes, the video flipping back and forth to the current speaker was distracting. But I felt that was a small price to pay to be able to communicate easily. I think that the contribution we make is that we are putting together a collection of places in Indiana that one may not necessarily find in a travel book or on the internet. Good grief - the Cedar Lake Historical Society doesn't even include any information about their museum on their own website! From Shawn: While it took some extra steps and equipment, the video chat was really cool. We even had to change plans on the fly switching from Skype to a Google+ Hangout. It was nice seeing online classmates for a change. One thing that may have helped was to have a moderator to make sure everyone participated. This may also have solved our camera flipping problem. (Even doing something as elementary as raising our hand may help that!) I didn't say much but that was mostly because I agreed with what was being discussed. Plus I was still in "deer in the headlights" mode due to the ease and quality of the video chat.

One drawback is that we have no "minutes" of the meeting, where oncourse chat or another written mode would have given us a record of what was discussed. If we had more time to explore Google+ I believe there is a way to utilize a google doc within the hangout too to record what we discussed or put our plan on paper. This may have helped us in the long run.

From Jordan: Video conferencing is a great tool to bring people together across large distances. Google+ worked well except for the weirdness of the constant video switching everyone here mentioned. It didn't always seem to work correctly. There were a few times were the main camera fixed on someone who wasn't speaking. I think I would have preferred to have one view of each of the chatters.

We discussed the difficulty of finding a topic that wasn't represented on the internet, so we came up with the idea of a travel guide that brings a new twist on some sites that are represented on the internet, but not together.

From Meghan: I really liked using the Google+ hangout. It was convenient for everyone to log in and use. I enjoyed it because I like to see people when we are collaborating on things. I think that aids in the communication. When you are able to see peoples faces and expressions as well as hear their voices and intonation, I think that it is a huge plus in communication. The only drawback to the hangout was the way that the screen kept switching to whomever was "talking" or making a noise, moving their papers, etc. I liked this option better than Oncourse Chat because of the lack of communication with typing only. Another drawback is not having a record of what was discussed in our meeting. I took notes on a notepad and we did talk back and forth on Google+ but I did think it would have been nice to see exactly what was said. It would have kept me from asking the same questions over and over.

I took on the role of leader in the hangout, mostly because I was excited to get started and I felt extremely comfortable using video chat. I use iChat to talk to my family almost every week. I asked everyone to come to the chat with at least two ideas on what we could do our project on, and I found it difficult to come up with ideas, but we did all bring some and then we discussed each one and settled on a unique travel guide to the state of Indiana. Including haunted places in each region. I got us started by setting up the wiki and inviting everyone.