Collaborative Group Writing So Far

It has been a particularly bad week for me to start a group project.  I have a ton of things going on, both at work and at school.  Friday I have a physics test that I am extremely worried about.  I also have some animal care training that day.  Tomorrow I have a quiz that might as well be called a test.  I am very, very stressed.

So, going into these first few group writing assignments, I have been very tired and very edgy.  I am finding that things are going as well as could be expected, however.  We have been very efficient and organized.  I got nervous Tuesday night because Amy had not been to class that day, and I was worried we would be too far behind, but we quickly caught up.  We got together on a google doc to chat about how we were going to split up the work.  I think we are all responsible, organized people, so we should have a fine time figuring out the best way to do this group work.

Even though we all have difficult schedules, I think that everything will turn out fine.  I sometimes have trouble releasing control to people I do not trust, but I think I can relax more in this project.  I am finding Cory and Amy to be great teammates, and I do trust them to do their parts.  I am confident moving into the rest of the group work.

Conferencing on Canvas Part 2

Canvas has let me down in a serious way again.  I made plans to conference with Amy Saturday night.  Unfortunately, I had a huge crisis come up at work, so I had to reschedule.  We made plans for Sunday night.  I had a good feeling about everything.  Then the worst happened.

My elms is not loading some pages correctly.  The conferencing page is one of them.  Another is my grades page for a different class.  I contacted support, but so far I have not heard anything.  Certainly nothing has been fixed.  

I am truly disappointed with new elms now.  The is the second time that the system has really let me down.  The first time was last semester when I suddenly was locked out of all of my class pages.  That was fixed within 24 hours, though.  I am hoping that this is not a semester long problem.  I have been assured by classmates and friends that their pages are all loading properly, and I tried loading my canvas from a friend's computer.  For some reason my account just will not load certain pages.  Perhaps it is some access error like what happened last semester again.  Who knows.

The moral of the story is new elms sucks.

Using Conferences on New Elms Part 1

Okay so we all know that there is New Elms. I feel like it is such a big deal that it should be capitalized like a proper noun. It has certainly been such a big deal for me that my mind gives it emphasis.

New Elms New Elms NEW ELMS!

Or as some professors call it now, Canvas. Calling it Canvas makes me think that I am Van Gogh or something, but I suppose it does make me crazy enough to want to cut off my own ear. I miss Blackboard. Life was so simple then. I never had classes disappear right when I had assignments due, and I never had a syllabus become "unavailable" randomly a week into class. I could just go see my grades all in one place. Now some professors are abandoning elms and creating different course websites, and some professors are just confusing me regularly by having me do crazy things on New Elms.

 I tried one of those crazy things tonight. I did a video conference tonight on canvas.

Every Terp reading this is probably thinking, "Lunacy! Keeping Canvas interactions simple is the only way to survive!" I know. That is what I thought too. When Skype exists, I just do not really see the point for video conferencing on New Elms. But, if you really think about it, it would be the most convenient to just video conference a professor or a group straight from Canvas instead of needing to friend everyone and blah blah blah. It really is a good idea in theory.

In practice, it falls short. Tonight one of my fellows in junior English (ENGL391) practiced conferencing with me. At first I had no sound. Then I could hear him. Then he had no sound. I messed with some settings and caused the most painful feedback noise; he could hear that. I closed out of the settings, and he still could not hear me. Then suddenly, I STOPPED BEING ABLE TO HEAR HIM AGAIN.

We are going to attempt to try again this weekend, but I do not have high hopes. So far I give Canvas Conferencing an A- for the idea, but a big, fat F for follow through.