Asynchronous and synchronous communication tools

The synchronous communication tools that I have chosen to use for this class are the blog I created and the class wiki.

I have finally gotten a clear vision of how I will be using the blog to organize the various tools we will be using and adding as we continue in this class. The blog I have created will of course be a reflective journal of the learning process. The blog now has a link to all of the students blogs in our class as well as the two that we selected relating to our profession. It will also be a base for accessing the RSS feed I have created in bloglines.

I chose to use bloglines as my aggregator because I already had experience with google reader and wanted to try something else. My experience with google reader was only for a couple of weeks so it's great to being trying blogline basically at the same time. I like the clean interface of bloglines and found it easy to set up. After seeing other students google reader usage last night during class I am seeing that it may be better than bloglines. I will keep experiencing bloglines throughout the class and see what the final judgement is.
The feauture that I think I will like the most as I continue to populate the aggregator with feeds is the ability to have one place to see whats new that I want to read. As mentioned in the WIRED article by Ryan Singel the information I want is going to be pulled by me and not push at me like the crap I get through e-mail spam.

I have participated in the classroom wiki as assigned but to be quite honest I don't like using it. The reason I am not a big fan is I have found that when I go back and look at it I can't really tell what's new and end up reading things that I have already read. I also find the format very unwelcoming to read. From a design point of view the sameness of all the entries is very boring and unappealing. I will keep working at appreciating the learning environment that the wiki provides and not focus as much on the aesthetics.

I have tried finding a professional development wiki that I can join and use as resource for teaching drafting and architectural design. I have not had any luck with this endeavor. I may be going about this wrong. I found a site that had an interesting narrative about Computer Aided Drafting, which is one of the subjects I teach, that I would like to edit but I have not gotten permission to edit the wiki. I doubt that I will get permission as it is part of a commercial site selling drafting services.

I made changes on wikipedia in the section on drafting here is the link to the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_drawing#Before_CAD. I rather enjoyed doing it. I kept thinking that I would not really have anything that I could contribute to a wiki until I got to this post on wikipedia and found quite a few things that needed editing. I think I may go back and work on it some more.