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So yesterday, I was a guest at #humanMOOC’s hangout debate on synchronous vs asynchronous learning. I was (of course) on the asynchronous side and Peggy Semingson was on the synchronous side, and Whitney Kilgore was facilitating. But being nice women that we all were, it was not too confrontational or “debate-like” (we had talked earlier about how we felt about this).
So anyway 🙂 The funniest things happened just before the debate began. I had an electricity cut, but thankfully it came back. It turns out I had messed up the meeting time, off by one hour; that turned out ok, because it was one hour later, so I had time in between my #rhizo14 meeting and that one. And then we had technical problems and had to start late (blame Google hangouts).
There were a couple of really important things that came out for me in the debate, other than the fact that there is a continuum of technologies and ways of using them to make them more/less accessible to learners, from using the chat feature of things like hangouts, to the occasional serendipity of finding someone online while tweeting or facebook PMing them…
- Peggy is right – mobile technologies make synchronous more convenient; it does for me, and I can do synchronous meetings while taking care of my child or household responsibilities, and I have 3G in case I lose electricity
- Since writing my Affinity of Asynchronous Learning article (and I still prefer it), I hang out with people on US timezones on average twice a week at night after my daughter sleeps. Some of it is sort-of commitments like the hangout y/day and the #et4online steering committee; other stuff is more “elective” like when we were working on #tvsz and preparations for several collaborative papers for #et4online
Anyway, so I created a rough graphic representing where technologies fell on a spectrum of sync/async and text&still/audio&video – and then made a neat version of it now on Piktochart… might use it in an upcoming workshop…
Here it is:
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