Connect Meetings and web conferences

The first connect meeting that I attended was for this class and also was my first real experience with any type of web-conferencing site. I have not even had this experience with social networking software or websites. Although initially the first meeting we had for the class started with a bit of technical difficulty, once we got going, it was actually a pretty successful meeting. I think that the issues that some of the users had revolved more around personal Internet connections rather than problems with the site. Overall I felt that this web tool would be very convenient for long distance work. I feel that for college level coursework, especially for instances such as this online course, that web conferences are definitely a necessity for communication. Although we have been communicating via discussion boards, nothing beats a more "face to face" conversation with your peers. For me personally I feel this would be most helpful for collaboration between colleagues if a in school meeting is difficult to set, although primarily I'm not sure how helpful the resource would be in a high school setting such as the one I am in. I think that this is definitely helpful for students to learn about and figure out how to use, because web conferencing can be a very useful tool, and I think will be much more prevalent in businesses and possibly education in the future. The biggest problem. besides working through the initial tech glitches, is finding a common meeting time as we have seen in this course so far. I have been able to only attend one of the meetings, however I feel that it was an extremely helpful meeting and am looking forward to future meetings as well.