How to make good choices

.. about tools and processes

The following questions will help you to clarify how to move ahead. What is the main activity or function you want the tools to support?

• information exchange
• idea creation
• decision making
• social/group building experiences?

Things to consider

You will make a better choice if you start with your own set of criteria. When you have found some suitable tools, make sure you include the following in your criteria:

• Will participants have the machine power and bandwidth to successfully use the tool?
• Does it require high bandwidth?
• Does the system support fonts in other languages? (Some of these issues are tool based, some are browser based.)
• Does it meet accessibility guidelines?
• Is the cost/support requirement reasonable? At what scale?
• Is there a 'snapshot 'utility to capture/archive the interactions (i.e. for a CD)?
• What will I do if (when) the technology doesn’t work as planned?

And, most importantly, consider whether the tools:

• are user friendly or difficult to use
  • contain many or few features that you like/use
  • are easy/hard to figure out
• are "push" (information comes to you, usually via your email box) or "pull" (you have to go get it, from the web or the Learning Management System (LMS)
• enable low or high interaction among participants/facilitators
• lend themselves towards synchronous (occurring in real time but independent of physical location - like a text chat) or asynchronous (independent of time or location - like email) activity.

Additional questions

• Do you need information be downloaded to mobile tools like Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), phones and mp3 players?
• Do you need it to work on multiple platforms? (eg Apple mac, Linux, and Windows/PC).

Consider whether the processes require:

• facilitator skills of a low or high level
• participant skills of a low or high level

Sometimes you may not have all this information when you start out and some of it might not be relevant to your situation, but it will help if you come to grips with these issues over time.

Many of the ideas for this section come from Nancy White’s website.

Examples of measuring with criteria

You can find examples of measuring software / resources against criteria here.

• Edutools provides a good online tool to compare different products, eg Learning Management Systems.
• NorthWest Educational Technology has a good and thorough approach to making decisions around Open Source software.

A different approach

Here’s another way of looking at this.

Tools (user friendly?)	Simple/routine	to	Complex
Tools (potential for the level of interaction among participant(s) and facilitator(s)	Low/no interaction	to	high interaction
Tools (time aspect)	Synchronous	both	Asynchronous
Tools (access aspect)	Push	both	Pull
Facilitator skills	Simple/routine	to	Complex
Participant skills	Simple/routine	to	Complex