Skype Assessment Thoughts

Ah, a topic...and an assigned one rather than one I have to think of. I know it is bad, but my brain breathed a sigh of relief.

I think there are three aspects to assessing class Skype usage.
The first is identifying what features have been tried out and experimented with. This could be assessed with a check off list where students check that they have tried a feature and perhaps identify the date that they tried it.
The second is assessing consistency of use and use for discussion with multiple classmates. For this, screen shotting the overall chat history page might work, but I know with mine that even a fully expanded window would still show less than 24hrs of usage statistics since we use Skype for almost all of our communications with the US; so, that might not work. Another option might be a little matrix with each week of the course on one axis and classmates on the other where students add a little X in the matrix for each person they talk to each week. That way, at least weekly usage is assessed.
The third is assessing quality of interactions. I like the method of asking for students to submit one chat log for this. It allows students to have chats that aren't as high a quality without worrying since those just won't get sent in but shows that the medium is being used for real class engagement at some point.

And as an aside, I have been trying to put at least some Skype info in my blog, and I haven't liked that. It feels very contrived and beside the point to put in. But that said, I think the highlight of my Skype-ing last week was using Skype to talk to my soon to be mentor about a project that will become my dissertation. I was very excited. I also took advantage of the need for a mentor switch to chat to MaryFriend about her ADHD research as well after the excitement I saw in others' blogs about that, and it was quite interesting. And, I've been on one group chat and a couple of individual chats with classmates.