Full Circle Associates

I am working on a project with a dear pal. One of our first steps is to resolve which technology(ies) we are going to recommend for a group interactive online learning experience.

The beginning of that task is to identify the sorts of activities we anticipate supporting - NOT starting with "we need X, Y and Z features." Then we'll start matching to tool options. This is a chance to do some more exploration. I like that.

We are also walking our talk, using tech to collaborate between Seattle and Setubal, Portugal. We are doing our thinking both synchronously with Skype (she is GMT and I am GMT -8), and asynchronously trying Basecamp and eSnips to share materials and have some tools for our own planning. In other words, the experiments run at many levels! I have looked at Basecamp, but never really used it, so this is a good opportunity.

We both are enjoying all the new "Web 2.0" tools and like the "small pieces, loosely joined" approach. Bev has recently done some really cool things with WikiSpaces. In talking with Bev today, I learned that Wikispaces has some cool features I did not know about. You can see the members, there is tagging, and Bev tells me there is a feature that tells you "people who viewed this page also viewed these pages." But I haven't found that yet.

At the same time, we realize the folks we will be working with are most likely not early adopters like us, have less online tech experience and have little time. Plus our workshop already has a ton of content. So in our tool research we are looking for individual elements that can be aggregated easily, useful and straightforward aggregators, plus keeping an eye on any other stuf we see out there.

This afternoon I have been experimenting with eSnips and Collective X .

eSnips is fun. That is my first impression. I started out with the idea that it was simply a file sharing utility. They give you 1 gig of storage for images, audio, video - whatever! You can organize it into folders, share it or keep it private. But it has a little bit of many things - none heavy on the features. "Posts" that sort of set up a blog like feel at the top of a folder. Profiles. I love the screen shot utility - brilliant, and am intrigued by the web clip feature. I haven't installed the Firefox tool bar to use that feature yet. When thinking of this tool in the context of an online workshop, it is still very oriented towards an individual, rather than a group. I need to see if it can be configured to be more group centric. Plus I have not looked into how it does or does not include RSS feeds. That is one of our criteria. Every tool must have either a RSS feed and/or an email interface/alert. (If anyone is interested, I can explain why.)

Collective X is still in beta (the image is a screen shot of their PR line - can't cut and paste text. Argh), but I had a chance to set up a group. Until I can populate it with a few other people AND be part of more than one group, I don't think I can see the networking piece built into the application.

CollectiveX has both collaboration and social networking features but in their by myself, that isn't happening! (Talk about an echo chamber!)

Ah, so many tools, so little time.

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