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The Connect & Learn Blog has come to an end.

Thank you to all who took the time to read our postings. We enjoyed sharing our thoughts and ideas with our students, and anyone else who happened to visit our site.

Online Study Hall?

Students email their professors continuously for help, often creating a breath of written communication that is difficult for their professors to manage. Piazza, a website developed by a Stanford University graduate student, may offer professors a solution that increases the manageability of help requests from students. The website contains a built-in study hall where professors and teaching assistants can easily monitor questions from students. This feature is also used to encourage students who understand the material to help students who are seeking help. The Piazza developer, Pooja Sankar, argues that this innovation simplifies student support for the professor by allowing the professor to post responses to a single online forum. Sankar says this approach is superior to approaches where the professor attempts to manage a scattershot of student email.

While this new innovation seems promising for professors, it is difficult understand how this innovation is superior to a well-designed online forum. After all, some learning management systems such as Canvas contain built-in, context-specific help.

Coffee Klatches Without Boundaries

"Klatch: a gathering characterized usually by informal conversation."

Why not hold such informal conversations online? Perhaps it has been because, up until now, the technological "hoops" you have to jump through have been too many to make such conversations either desirable or useful. Moreover, such conversations have been previously limited to text-based chats in which the pace is set by the slowest user, or typist (or "keyboardist", ...whatever).

Your scribe here has not been a fan of "chat". When it takes me 45 minutes to cover a point with a student or chat partner when a phone call or a face-to-face visit would have taken just 5 minutes, well... for me, nothing more graphically illustrates the disadvantages of "chat."

And yet, as educators we want to establish an informal, collegial relationship with our students, don't we? I can think of more arguments in favor of having that type of atmosphere than against.

Now that Canvas has arrived at the University of St. Francis, you may want to revisit the value of holding chat conferences anew, but this time from the perspective of using webcams and microphones. With today's "plug and play" types of devices, it is not anywhere near as hard as you think to get a webcam and mic working on your computer, and ready to go.

In Canvas, when you select "chat", the chat application opens, and gives you an obvious button to "start broadcasting". A "wizard" walks you through the steps of connecting your webcam and microphone, and a video window with you in it pops up in the chat area. And then you wait for visitors.

In the "Preparing to Teach Online" class in Canvas, I scheduled "Coffee Klatches" that appeared on the course calendar with notifications to students. These were mere half-hour sessions in which I entered the chat room, fired up my webcam and mic, and patiently waited with a mug of coffee in my hand. I planned no instruction; I just wanted to hold an "office hours" type of event where we could talk about anything.

One student showed up, then another, and we had a three-way conversation with webcams and mics. Sometimes I'd have to ask a participant to mute his or her microphone when not talking, but that was no big deal, and the conversation would carry on.

We'd jaw away at each other, and invariably the conversation swung to course matters. We'd get a lot done, just talking, as though we were in the same office together. I believe the instructors who participated in this will use it in the Canvas courses they teach.

Of course, you need to bring your own coffee.

Apple iPad Review: The Retina Display Redefines the Tablet

The 2012 refresh of the Apple iPad wows, but not for the reasons so often associated with Apple products. After all, at first glance it appears to be the same product--it's just barely thicker and a tad heavier than the model that came before it. But that impression changes once you turn on the iPad's screen: That's when the new iPad not only takes your breath away but also demonstrates how Apple has redefined the tablet game--again. More->>