This discussion tread was a short one.  Nevertheless, some interesting points have been mentioned.

Stephen shared with us a collaborative experience he had with Richard in this class.  He brought forward a good point which is that sometimes it can be difficult to collaborate with someone when you don't have the same skill level.  As Stephen said: 'It is difficult to collaborate on the content while teaching oneself the ins and outs of the tool."

He mentioned that he would be interested to find out if there is information on 'how the differences in knowledge and skill levels among online groups effect the collaborative process.'

Hummm...  I'll have to keep looking for this.

Patrick Kelly mentioned that vagueness can be a very frustrating experience especially when your job is to help people but the people you are trying to help don't give you the information you actually need to be able to help them.  It can be a frustrating and a 'getting nowhere' situation.

Chuck mentioned some good and worst points of supporting people in the use of of software through e-mail.  He stated that for him, the best part of this method is convenience.  Both the helper and the one receiving help can work at their own time and convenience.  There is no need to travel or to fit schedules to be able to meet each others.  The worst part is trying to explain a solution in writing especially when the one you are trying to help has little knowledge of what you are talking about.  Chuck concluded that maybe collaboration work best when the skill level and understanding is not too far apart.

Gord shared with us an experience he had when being a designer/leader for a Telecollaborative Project.  In this case they were promised by their school board email account for all their students.  The school board failed to provided them with the required email account for each students.  I can relate to Gord's experience as I was also waiting for email accounts for my students and the school board didn't want us to use Hotmail account.  Luckily, Gord and his partner(s) were able to go around this by using their own personal email account.  But still ...

Here's the address of Gord's two successful projects.

http://www.2learn.ca/projects/projectcentre/pages/Nunavut/Mainpage.html

http://projects.cbe.ab.ca/hawkwood/HTML/index2.html
 

Thanks all for sharing.
 

Brigitte  : )