When typing beats talking
January 3rd, 2007
Alan Levine wrote about Walking the Tools at CogDogBlog the other day, advocating that people who talk about technology and learning apply technology to learning.
I hopped to the link he mentioned, then to another, and (I think) yet another, landing at 37Signals. There I watched the audio/video tour of Campfire, their product for collaborative chat. (The under-five-minute tour is a terrific example of how to do a demo.)
Campfire enables a sort of group IM (more than two people can participate in the conversation), includes file space, maintains a history (chats are recorded), and allows retrieval by chat room, by date, by participant.
As with any new tool, I think you’d feel odd at first, meeting as a virtual group via typed chat rather than on a conference call. The potential benefits seem valuable, though: a record of who said what, the ability to “post-attend” by reviewing what happened in a chat before you got there, the shared files/links.
I’m looking forward to trying this out.
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