Communication: The Networked Classmate

Communication with a wide group of people becomes so difficult when you have a wide variety of ways to do it, and the intelligence and aptitude levels of the target audience varies considerably. :D

This is only expected as you can't have everybody understanding everything there is to understand. IF that was the case, then what we must ask the question: would the For Dummies(R) series have even existed? Probably not, but if everybody was expected to learn things as a dummy would, then it would probably be a better thing for the dummy books to exist.

Okay, this discussion concerns methods for communication across a wide variety of poeple with differing levels of comprehension and techno-comfort barriers. The more sophisticated ones would head on over to an IRC chatroom where all their classmates would be waiting at their keyboards, armed with up-to-date information to share with everybody else. The others would just slither over to class and wait for somebody (the class crier??) to raise their voice and disseminate information.

The objective here is to create a

redundant, efficient, low-cost, and speedy, wide-reaching

communication system to deliver and share information among the entire class.

The trouble with both approaches is that, they just don't work the way they're supposed to! Information delivered to people in class has the following features:

• Max audience reach, because most people are expected to be present in class at any given time of the day, however there are exceptions to this! (Think mass bunking)
• Whenever somebody makes a lot of noise to make his/her presence felt, people (unless they're making a lot of noise themselves) actually spend a few moments of their waking time listening to what they have to say (this is subject to variations depending on the ambient level of noise)
  
• Very few people actually dream of going up on stage to give seminars. "Not something I'd want to do everyday" sayeth the average Macha/Machi in class; so when somebody actually stands above everybody else, it is at least assumable that they have something to say

So, that's the take on the class. How do we make the communication personal?
Via the Internet? Why not? What happened to good ole' text messages? Let's use that for something more than just jokes! Let's use these to communicate and network! You see it's all about information. Let's examine some benefits these mediums offer:

• One-to-one communication, it's there, it doesn't go away (as long as you don't lose your phone, or end up breaking your machine)
  
• Intention and purpose can be made clear and concise depending on how one intends for the audience to interpret the message
• Efficient broadcasting medium: everybody gets the message and redundancy is ensured by broadcasting through multiple channels. (Chances of the Internet going down are far lesser than the chances of your mobile network going down)

If we can exploit a combination of these mediums, we'll probably end up with a far better level of communication among everybody in class.

Which is why, I'm proposing that we use Twitter (for SMS and Web), Google Groups (Web), and GMail (Web) for achieving what we want to do. We've already started using two of these services as you know, we just have to complete rolling out to twitter, and then in a few days and with very minimal expense, we'll be the first completely networked class in CMRIT. :D

I'll prepare an plan outline in the next couple of days, after the internals, and then we'll do what we have to do to get this off the ground.

Comments, questions, and ideas? Put it here, or start a thread in the group.

UPDATE: Just created a jaiku account, field tests will begin with a subset of class-student-body. Interested guinea pig cellphone users may volunteer cellphones (and that means talktime as well) and their time and patience to help us get this setup. We're trying it with a maximum of 5-10 people to see if we can actually make this work.

We'll also try it with twitter and see if that works as well. Just leave comments for this post, or reply to the "Getting Things Organized Thread" (requires you to be signed in to access) in the group to express your interest in poking around with T9 and URLs for about 20 minutes. I'll let you know when the time is right!