A brief review of Horizon Wimba as Blackboard building block
Even though Blackboard is making me very annoyed today, I still have to use it and increasingly I feel beaten down by confused and/or withering looks when I suggest that its design is more of a content management than learning management (but they seem to view it as an earning management system). Voice is an underused medium in learning over Blackboard, at least as far as I’ve seen –because it’s clumsy. But the Horizon Wimba building block is an attempt to build in interactivity, and if it works properly, it beats trying to teach instructors and students how to record and edit audio on their own or get all mucked up in miscellaneous tools unsupported by the college (thus there is no official strategy to meet any downloading and installing trouble. And this is not necessarily my viewpoint, but it is certainly a common viewpoint).
I work with a very progressive foreign language faculty member who has had students use Gizmo to record paired conversations and post the mp3 to the Blackboard discussion board. She had several students who had trouble downloading and installing Gizmo for whatever reason, so she gave some other options to remedy this. She also wasn’t teaching wholly online, and had the option to explain and negotiate with students who might be anxious about using new tools in person. This is not a luxury many of the faculty I work with have. The point is, we were evaluating Wimba to try and replicate this assignment, but with tools integrated into Blackboard to “make it less complicated.”
Wimba has four different tools, more or less: Voice Board, Voice Email, Voice Annoucement, and Voice Direct.
Voice Board is pretty cool. It basically functions like a discussion board, but with voice, as it should. I will definitely recommend that instructors use it, and it starts to make it less excusable for voice to be an add-on in distance courses (except for the fact that each course has to indicate individually if it wants to use wimba at our institution).
Voice Email - First, our phone voicemail already automatically comes to email, so it is not a necessary add-on. I had a little bit of trouble with the voice email. It was most likely my network. The browser froze up and wouldn’t seem to let my type my subject line. Also it seems to have only directionality TO the professor, and you can’t edit which ones. So my joke test message to the instructor where I was going to type “I hate your course” in the title (A JOKE! You try thinking of original test messages!) got cut off due to the browser problems I was having and was truncated to “I hate you” and got sent off (Ok, I should have been patient and not fidgeted) not just to her email and my email but our Blackboard administrator who is listed as an instructor in the course. I simply sent a reply to all that it was a mistake; students sending a voice email accordingly may not know the reach of the message they sent.
Voice Announcement, like Voice Board seems functional and allows for the instructor recording voice directly without uploading files. So far so good.
Then we got to testing Voice Direct Conference. It sets up a voice chat which can either be recorded or not. It employs what I would term “walkie talkie” technology- very cutting edge. You have to hold down control to talk, and while you’re holding down control, the other person can’t talk. Essentially, it requires very careful turn-taking, as in “over and out.” It does have a text chat, which we started using by the end of the conversation as the voice was frustrating to negotiate.
Then we checked out the archive and I took a screenshot because I found it so bizarre:
Each disparate voice recording within our conversation is its own file. The text chat is separate as well. There is no “whole” recording, just line by line. I cannot imagine why it was designed this way, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that it has no pedagogical grounding. That part of the tool is completely useless. Maybe I’m being too dismissive. I do welcome any suggestions as to why it is designed like this because I cannot think of any way in which it could be useful. You can export the files (Exporting is good! Blackboard hardly ever allows release of anything that has entered its virtual territory) and it probably minimizes the size of each individual file..but you can’t individually name them. You can’t listen to the totality of the conversation in one piece.
WHY IS IT DESIGNED LIKE THIS?
