About

This site is dedicated to an experiment with desktop video conferencing.  During my days as an ed tech administrator, the most fun I had was having conversations over coffee.  I'd like to know whether I can replicate the feeling virtually, and thereby produce the fun things from the job without having all the burdens that came with the work.  Then I'd like to know if there are enough others out there who are interested in trying this that I can have a calendar full of such conversations.

I'm most interested in the psychological aspects of using desktop video conferencing..  If the technology is used for a while, does it tend to become autonomous and therefore largely ignored, with the conversation itself coming to the fore?  If that happens for me, can it also happen for the various guests who participate in such a conversation?

For each conversation, the approach will be to go at it for a while, to make sure all the logistics are in working order and to get the guest comfortable.  Then I'll start to record the conversation.  The guest will get to preview the recording and will give the okay (or not) to publish it to this blog.  The purpose of the recordings are to market the approach so I can recruit other guests.  If there is other derivative benefit from the recordings, that is fine, but it is not the aim.

Regarding topic of conversation, just about anything goes.  Learning happens everywhere so I envision a broad set of conversations.  There will be a few recurrent themes, however.  One is why on TV there are talk shows with host and guest(s) but so far in the use of video for instruction there are lectures with only one speaker.  Is it that each approach is best in its own domain?  Or is it that the discussion approach to video might be more effective with some instruction, but we haven't figures out to do that yet, because face to face instruction has been dominated by the lecture.