Week 2 Web Conference

I read the Week 2 Web Conference from November 23^rd, 2011.  These web conferences so far have been so much more laid back than the others I have attended in the past.  This may sound strange, because we are all usually sitting around at home, with the TV in the background, but never were we asked to introduce ourselves and where we work, thereby giving it a much more personal, homey feeling than the ones in the past.  It seems we are all having issues with this week’s assignment.  Some of us are having issues with Audacity/LAME, others with finding a place to post, and still others with the directions.  Those issues seemed to be cleared up during this session.  According to Dr. Abernathy, the directions were to do just an audio recording (accompanying video optional) and find a palce to post.  Some students were having issues with finding where to download LAME (myself included), but one of the students explained that LAME comes with Audacity, and when it is time to save it and export it as an .mp3 file, to go through our library and find the LAME software, open it, and then hit save, and it will successfully encode the audio file as an .mp3.  What luck! The second major discussion point was whether we were to do a 2 minute or one minute presentation, as the assignment paper said both.  However, we determined to just keep it under two minutes and hope for the best.  Deeper in the assignment paper, on page 5, it says 2 minutes or less, so we went with that.  It made me feel better that I had done the assignment properly.

I thought it was really funny that during the course of the evening, some of the students were discussing Black Friday deals, and one even sent a link for a video recorder on sale on Friday the 25^th!  Students were also sharing their Thanksgiving plans, and I believe one or two were either leaving that night for a friend or relative’s home, or were already there.  This really gave the conference a very informal feeling, very personable, something I noticed the last few courses web conferences lacked.  We really are all just working towards a common goal (a degree) while trying to lead normal lives.  I guess we took it for granted that none of us really did/do anything else!  This conference reinforced the importance of a distance learning degree: that we can still learn new things and connect with our classmates and live very normal lives not consumed by school work.  This week’s web conference really cleared up some major points of confusion for me, and I look forward to Week 3.