Chronicles of a Group project: Cyber Camp PSA

Week 3:
My being overseas while the rest of the group is in Texas didn't make the slightest difference in our ability to work together on this project. It actually gave a new dimension to the meaning of distance education.
This experience is one more proof that distance education is not distant at all, technology has annihilated physical and mental boundaries that were traditionally attributed or caused by the geographical distance between teacher and student or students collaborating together.
That said, I was concerned at the beginning of this project, because of the 6 hour time difference between the location where I am spending my vacation and Texas. But, as a group we were able to coordinate our efforts and overcome this challenge.
First, we used email to initiate contact between team members that had not worked with each other before, and got things started.
Second, we set up a wiki for our project at: http://lamar-group-5363.wikispaces.com, and started collaborating.
Then, I suggested that we have brainstorming sessions via video conferencing using Oovoo which is a free video calling software that allows for up to 6 people to video conference at the same time.
There was an initial apprehension from some group members about installing a new software in their pc, but after the first conference everyone was excited about video conferencing, for it allowed us to meet our team members for the first time, "put a face to the name".
In the second conference members of the group one interacted productively with other members in real time, brainstorming, typing and editing our proposal and script while getting to know each other a little more.
Throughout week 3 we constantly communicated via email and Wiki, everyone was looking forward to the third video conference.
Our third video conference of the week was even more productive, as everyone got comfortable with video conferencing, we managed to assess our progress, discuss our work, while collaborating in the wiki and editing the google doc all in the same session.