Video Conferencing!

Alright, so this week we explore the phenomenon that is video conferencing.  First off, I consider it important to remember that "video conferencing" is a relatively new concept can be stretched from four college friends "Skypeing" in during the summer months to several multimillionaires discussing their next business move over the most sophisticated Cisco communications network.  When you break it down to the most basic bits, the process and idea is the same, but for some reason there can be a glamor associated with some products as opposed to others.  With that in mind, let's look over the ones that were provided for us this week:

Software/Website	Pros	Cons
Skype	·         Available on all major platforms ·         Free ·         Easily accessible ·         Well-known ·         Instant messaging ·         Recordable	·         No co-browsing; could prove difficult to lead a webinar when everyone has to find their own pages.
Connect Now	·         Available on all major platforms ·         Part of the Adobe line, close tie-in with Acrobat and Reader ·         Whiteboard features for multiple contribution and feedback	·         License purchase necessary ·         There doesn’t seem to be a way to upload documents and make them easily sharable, which I would assume an Adobe product would be able to do.
Tiny Chat	·         Quick and easy video chatrooms ·         Free ·         No downloads required.	·         Anyone else think this seems like a really sketchy website?  Could be all too easy to stumble upon something undesired.
Meeting Burner	·         Has a free option for up to 10 participants and e-mail support. ·         Screen sharing helps with partial co-browing that programs such as Skype do not allow.	·         Requires a purchase to increase functionality. ·         Recordings are not free.
Go To Meeting	·         Webinar and Training options for increased interaction among participants. ·         Mobile support.	·         Holy expensive packages Batman! ·         Some features not available across all platforms
Yugma	·         Skype add-on ·         Allows collaboration ·         Presenter/audience differentiation with ability to change presenters	·         Not available across all platforms ·         Not free
Webex	·         Part of the aforementioned Cisco machine. ·         HD video! Great for those multimillion dollar conferences!!!	·         Expensive ·

Most of these I never foresee myself using, as they have features that are in my opinion more for business-y settings that I will ever experience.  At one point in my senior year of undergrad I believe I participated in a Go To Meeting seminar as part of a experimental observation procedure for New York State education (I dropped put because my student teaching placement was a nightmare).  I particularly enjoy how Yugma is available as an add-on to Skype, increasing the functionality of an application that many college students already will have installed on their computers;  reaching the masses and the typical computer user is a great product model, so in regards to the collaboration aspect Yugma comes out on top for me.  On a last note, I'm going to avoid Tinychat like the plague....

Web 2.0 and Search Engines

I recently have become aware of the multiple systems and websites that can be collected under the "Web 2.0" umbrella and the many factors that come into play when a user beings heavily utilizing Web 2.0 tools.  While Web 2.0 sites are usually conceived as strictly "social networking" sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest (I guess MySpace can be included too, but I'm not sure how extensively that's used anymore), there is a whole system of sharing of ideas and concepts that can be listed as a Web 2.0 feature. 

The blog, for instance, is a method for me to record my thoughts on a given topic and share them with others.  Hosts such as Blogspot, Blogger, Wordpress, and Gawker are ways that users can share content with each other in a variety of ways, be it in the form or text, pictures, video, long prose or short and sweet quips.  If you can think of a topic there's probably a blog about it, and then there's likely a whole other selection of blogs and written shared works about the things in our world you've never heard of. 

Take into account the website Reddit, in which users posts items that they have found on the Internet or items that they have produced themselves.  These posts are then voted positive or negative, with the posts receiving the most positive votes being listed as the "most popular" and being displayed on the website's front page for all users to enjoy.  In addition these posts can be sorted into a variety of "sub-Reddits" based on different topics or categories whether broad or extremely specific.  Users can then subscribe to sub-Reddits in order to instantly receive the best voted content relevant to the topics they are interested in.  My personal Reddit subscriptions include Teaching, the Yankees, Survivor, swimming, Marvel Comics, and a general category of "Books."  All of this content is sorted for me to peruse at my convenience and communicate with others in a message board style setting.

The idea of setting aside content leads me to the next topic, search engines.  I admit, I can be very lazy when I need to look something up on a specific site, but just Google the site name and the topic instead (example: Reddit Survivor; the sub-Reddit I already mentioned and one of my topics).  Search engines can be very valuable and very dangerous at the same time.  Working in a classroom, students can find anything they need online with just a simple Google search as well as ANYTHING that they don't need or don't need to see.  Even with firewalls in place at school it seems that students are able to have inappropriate content sneak through to their searches inadvertently without a simple and precise method of sorting content. 

Google is the undisputed king of search engines at this point, but I personally think it's absurd I can't just block off Google Image on some devices without blocking Google altogether or having to contact the district technology head (Hey Google, seeing as you host Blogger maybe you can help me out with this?  I'm sure you can read this post if you so choose...)  I actually made a very lengthy journal entry regarding this during my observations, that by making the Internet easier and more accessible do search engines in turn make it harder to discover (or avoid) knowledge on one's own?

As for our list of search engines, for the most part I wasn't particularly impressed or distraught by anything specific I came up with on any of them.  As a history major in undergrad I especially value the Library of Congress and the National Archives, while Google Scholar and Infotopia (powered by Google, so the same thing?) seem like reliable database as well.  My personal favorite database in Academic Search Elite, which was not included on our list but has been my go-to database research wise since high school.  I can't remember the last time I did a paper without checking on at least one article from the database, and will continue to do so beyond my graduate work.