Hmmm, dunno what I think about Thinkature, but it seems like a decent little tool. I was looking for a free web based collaborative tool for my Searching The Internet class – came across this. We don’t have elluminate available college-wide (although I would like to use elluminate sessions in my Distance Ed offering of the same course). The idea that I wanted to do is a whiteboard session where people add different ideas as to what web searching means to them – it bombed in class. Terribly. It resorted to me talking and drawing answers out of people. I think one of the reasons it failed was that it just wasn’t something people expected. They expect to come in use the computers and leave. Asking people to get up in front of the class and express how they feel about searching doesn’t work for them. So, maybe using a website will be more in line with what they expect, but get what I want out of them.
As an aside, the whole webmaster certificate course is very silo’d. I don’t know what other people are teaching, I just know my areas. So if I teach something, it’s quite possible it’s been taught before. In another class. It’s also very geared to the web individual. The part that’s missing is that web designers rarely act alone. They interact with clients, other designers to figure out problems, other programmers to deal with database code or scripting and have a brief idea of what consumers want out of websites.