[IAEP] Yet more feedback from Boston! - Chat and Speak

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Caroline
Meeks<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> Neither wind nor rain nor flaming emails will deter me from telling you
> about what happened with kids and Sugar today in Boston! You however are
> free to use your delete key at any time.
> Today, working with 6th grade students at the Museum of Science Computer
> Clubhouse I learned not to start a Sugar intro session with chat.  It was
> hard for us to believe but the kids spent 3 hours really wanting to do
> nothing but use chat to talk to other kids in the same room!!  We did get
> them to use other things but
> next time I will end with Chat, not start with it :)
> We used both Chat and Speak.  Chat was more robust.
> I suggest that Speak be limited to about 4 participants. It seemed die a lot and if someone typed a lot of garbdy gook it would try to say it all and get behind.  What do other people think of this idea? Should I ticket it?
> I started the lesson by creating a chat, sharing it and showing the students
> how to join from their neighborhood. That worked fairly well.
> However, some of the students wanted to create a private chat.  It could be
> done but it was very challenging workflow.  The problem is if two kids
> decide they want to chat the natural thing for them to do is both goto Home
> and click on Chat and share that with the neighborhood.  This results in two
> chats and much confusion.  I don't know how to solve this, as I'm not gifted
> at UI design, but its clearly a problem.  Perhaps when you start chat you
> have a UI inside of chat that lets you join other existing chats directly.

The chain of problems in introducing collaboration are described on
the page [[The undiscoverable]]. My conclusion is that collaboration
has to be taught carefully, step by step, and not all at once. I don't
know which are the best activities for doing this. I need to know what
others think. More comments and data, please, either on the main page
or the talk page.

> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)