5670 Web Conference Evaluation and Planning

Well, it has been good getting back into eLearning this semester. We started off having a discussion about the Web Conference from last year and working on coming up with questions and answers as a class so we can make some changes for the 2nd round. Before this discussion, I had an idea of some things that worked or did not work (ie. our Simulations group had a lot of questions asked about what the difference is between Simulations and Games that we were not quite prepared for beforehand). But actually getting into a whole discussion and coming up with solutions has helped me feel more confident about the next Web Conference.

I really appreciated the work Marilyn Czerwinski did in putting up all of the starter questions and getting the discussion going. Sometimes it can be daunting to start a big discussion like this, and nobody had said anything for a few days. Then David Beattie put together a list of questions from the evaluations done by Joni’s class which was very insightful and addressed some of the issues that our participants had. This will help us make the conference more useful and interesting for the people who will be visiting in February when we run it again.

I think my best contribution for this discussion was: “I think one of the issues that came up in our session was a question about the difference between Serious Games and Simulations. There was a lot of discussion back and forth, but I don't know that we ever really got to a clear distinction between the two. So my question is, can we get clear definitions together or would it be advantageous to combine the groups because of the overlap? If there are also other groups combining, then I would also suggest we do a little longer run of the conference, perhaps the 2 weeks of running them all at the same time?” This issue on the difference between Games and Simulations seemed to generate a lot of discussion, and I think that we could have some discussion on it and get them defined well and then move on so we can have people learn more about how they work and who they benefit. Then we will not spend all of our time on semantics in 2 different groups. I am definitely looking forward to seeing how this next conference goes now that we have one run under our belts and have worked together in groups and as a class to improve it for the 2nd round.