Progress So Far

Now that we are about two weeks or so into the virtual team assignment, this first blog will concern mainly our team’s progress so far.

My first piece of work after the team was formed was deciding which collaborative technology to choose. After some deliberation I decided to do podcasts. I thought that this would be an interesting challenge for me. I, of course, had heard of podcasts, but didn’t know all that much about them and had never used them before.

In my initial research about them it was clear they were a popular form of internet entertainment. They seemed to be most popular for delivering radio shows and things of that nature. I also knew that they were used to deliver audio lectures here on our course in UL. So it seemed interesting to see how they would work out for team collaboration, as opposed to just delivering audio to listeners.

Our first team meeting took place on Feb 7 and was held in the Sulis chat-room. Here we all confirmed the technologies we would each be researching. This was also our first opportunity to meet with our two American colleagues John Savage and Stacey Marmonstein, and get to know them a little better.

My first podcast was posted on Feb 10. This podcast recorded a team meeting amongst the Irish team-mates: myself, Maresa Molloy and Katrina Slammon. Here we reflected on our experience so far on participating in a virtual team. For me the most interesting part of this exercise was learning about the software needed to make a podcast. After looking at You Tube tutorials I downloaded Audacity. This is a freely available opensource sound recorder. To allow you to convert the audio files to mp3 I downloaded a piece of software called Lame and plugged it in to Audacity. It worked well in recording this meeting and the sound quality was ok.

The only drawback to Audacity is it can crash as happened when trying to record our team’s meeting on Skype which took place on February 14. I’m not sure if this was to do with the length of the recording, or the fact that Skype was open at the same time. But again using You Tube tutorials it was easy to learn how to recover files using the Audacity Recovery Utility. The project so far has definitely improved my knowledge of sound recording and fixing problematic software in general.

So far the collaboration has been fun. It will be interesting to see how all of the tools work out and which are the most advantageous for use in collaboration.

Brian.