electro-textual

Christine rang me on the phone, “michael i’ve done something to the (PRACE) web site.” She went on to describe how she’d lost her work and one of the pages had somehow reverted to an earlier version with last year’s brochure.

i have to admit i’m terrible at providing help desk assistance over the phone. i really need the visuals, because often i can’t make sense of the way people describe their screen. Maybe it’s my weak listening skills.. maybe it’s because people leave out important details. I think that in order to solve technological issues i need to see every bit of the screen. There’s a huge amount of visual literacy involved in screen-based communication and networking.

So we tried elluminate as a way to share Christine’s screen (it didn’t work). While we were waiting she mentioned she’d just been on skype with her family overseas.

What am i thinking? Skype has screen-sharing these days.

We found out how Christine could reveal her workspace over the skype connection, and as soon as i had the visuals i could be helpful again. We solved the problem together. In fact i think Christine worked it out herself, she just needed the confidence of having someone there to say, “Yes you’re doing the right thing.”

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[Screen-sharing: how? From memory, it's in Conversation => Video => Share your screen, but i'll have to double-check.]

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Possibly useful resources

• • • • Interestingly, the mac version of skype had screen-sharing before the windows version. On linux we’re still waiting (or maybe not).
      • All about screen sharing on the skype site.
      • Sue Waters gives a good overview of the basics of skype on the Edublogger.
      • Silvia Tolisano provides a very good set of ideas for using skype in the classroom, as part of her “around the world with 80 schools” project (Langwitches).

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photo credit: Sean Davis (thanks!)