Gina

Last night I visited the class chat room.   No one was there when I first logged on, but then one by one 4 other people showed up!  It was fun chatting with classmates.  There was a lot of different conversations going on, so sometimes a question someone asked wouldn’t get answered.  For this reason, I couldn’t really see it being used for group instruction; however, I have used the Vista chat room in the past to work in small groups and that was pretty successful. 

One difference I noticed between Meebo and Vista was that Meebo allows users to change fonts and colors while typing, and even add emoticons.  I really liked that feature.  Also, Meebo shows the different users names in varying colors, so it is easier to keep track of who said what.  One disadvantage to Meebo is that you can only scroll back so far to see what was said previously.  With Vista, I believe you can scroll back through the entire conversation.

Note added 6/27: I wrote that before we were able to access the chat logs, which is a great tool in Meebo that is unavailable in Vista.

Today, when I visited the class chat room that was set up on Meebo, Rebecca was in there, and I was able to ask some one-on-one questions, which was great.  I hadn’t been able to access the Meebo chat box on the class blog, so Rebecca directed me to her website, where she has another chat box set up.  That worked great!  I’d love to have a chat box like that set up on our library blog, but I don’t think it’s feasible, since we don’t have a reference librarian, or anyone else, who is on the internet a lot at the library.

What I like about chat is the quick back and forth, as opposed to e-mail where if your question is not fully answered the first time, you have to wait for someone to get back to you once again.  The downside to reference services, as pointed out by some of my classmates, is that there is a certain expectation that goes along with the “instant” connotation of “instant messaging.”  Also, in order to justify the staffing needed for IM services, there has to be shown to be a need for it.  But how can a need be shown if the service is just starting up?  I know, it’s a conundrum.