{"id":180,"date":"2008-09-10T08:30:30","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T14:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/?p=180"},"modified":"2008-09-10T08:30:30","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T14:30:30","slug":"office-hours-via-instant-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/2008\/09\/10\/office-hours-via-instant-message\/","title":{"rendered":"Office Hours via Instant Message?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a recent report at Inside Higher Ed<\/a>, some colleges are moving to connecting students and faculty via Instant Message.\u00a0 At Ivy Tech Community College, in Indiana, serves more than 115,000 students a year on 23 separate campuses across the state, adopted an instant messaging platform called Pronto, from the collaborative learning software company Wimba<\/a>.\u00a0 Here’s how Andy Guess describes it in the article:<\/p>\n

Like a turbocharged AOL Instant Messenger or Google Talk, it lets students chat online with their professors in text, audio or video form, for virtual office hours or impromptu question-and-answer sessions.<\/p>\n

Unlike the free IM clients students are already familiar with, though, the software integrates with existing course management systems, such as Blackboard and Moodle, so that their buddy lists are populated with the classmates already signed up for a specific course. Students also see each other\u2019s real names, with identities that are validated through the system \u2014 no \u201csk8rdude21\u2033 who may or may not be your group partner \u2014 and they can save their chats for later consultation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Several years ago, I experimented with being available to students via Instant Message for “virtual office hours.”\u00a0 It was a new-enough idea at the time that it was sort of thrilling, for them and for me.\u00a0 But, I have to admit, the thrill wore off pretty quickly.\u00a0\u00a0 In part, that was because of the blending of “public” and “private” personas on the IM client.\u00a0 I may want to share my IM handle with friends, but it’s another thing to be that accessible to students.\u00a0\u00a0 And, the most frustrating part of me as a professor was that after the semester – and this experiment – ended, all my students were still on my “buddy list” and they continued to contact me via IM long afterward.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps this why I no longer use IM much.\u00a0\u00a0 Still, I think that a proprietary system that’s directly tied to class rosters, uses people’s real names, and\u00a0 – perhaps most importantly – goes away at the end of a semseter, might have potential for creating a sense of belonging to a campus community.\u00a0\u00a0 This will be an interesting development in social media to keep an eye on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a recent report at Inside Higher Ed, some colleges are moving to connecting students and faculty via Instant Message.\u00a0 At Ivy Tech Community College, in Indiana, serves more than 115,000 students a year on 23 separate campuses across the state, adopted an instant messaging platform called Pronto, from the collaborative learning software company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[601],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-instant-message"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions\/181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/contech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}