At Last! We meet!

This afternoon, after much emailing and chasing messages and wondering what in the world we are doing, my group was finally able to meet in Teleplace. Hallelujah! We met this afternoon at 4:30 and I was home with my 3 youngest. Within about 10 minutes, the baby was up from his nap, crying for me to get him up and I had to apologize for the noise in the background a couple of times, but we got through it.
Honestly, I am feeling a little like guinea pigs again, like we are the test subjects to find all the bugs and chase them out. I think ConnectYard has wonderful potential for truly helping people connect across disciplines and find commonalities using the "trends" feature of the site. It is a nice way to connect in terms of emails/twitter/facebook but it does have its limitations. I have always been wordy and talkative, so my emails (and my blogs) tend to go on and on and on. Not good on ConnectYard. Also, attachments don't seem to work, so when I cut and pasted a document into my email message, the message became to long so it was cut off (right at the important part, I might add). AAAARRRGGGHHH!!! I realize that, to a large extent, the problem is that my expectations don't match up with the reality and that I don't have a lot of time to sit and figure this out. I haven't been to bed before 2 am for the last 2 nights. And there's no summer vacation at my house--had to be up by 7, with a middle of the night waking by my one year old around 3:30 am. I'm getting old and I can't keep up these "undergrad" hours like I used to be able to do. End of griping.
I found myself in a position of teaching about Teleplace, which I love. I could be the poster child for Teleplace, the cheerleader, the highly-paid spokesperson. I set up a space for us to work this afternoon, just the corner of a room with a display screen, a bookshelf, and some resources that were already given to us, ready to share. It was not unlike setting up house, making things cozy. When the first people arrived, it was so nice to be able to tell them how Teleplace will help us with our group project and have tools and resources ready to get started. Only one member of my group had ever been into Teleplace before, so we had a bit if a speedbump at the beginning getting everyone logged on and ready. Apparently, there wasn't enough introduction on the part of their professor(s) to prevent the last minute "we're about to meet and I don't know what's going on" panic. We made it through our first meeting. One group member never showed and responded to an email earlier in the week but has dropped off the planet since then. But we worked together, each contributing our own expertise, divided a few tasks, we have a mission to work on independently, and we have set up another meeting time. Teleplace worked beautifully for us, even the newbies. With our varied schedules, this project has proven to be more difficult than expected to coordinate enough meeting times to get the project done. Next time, I would suggest 3 weeks, because it has taken 4 days just to get everyone together to meet for the first time. I feel like we don't have much more time to get our goal accomplished. If everyone was already familiar with Teleplace, the time frame would have been easier.

I realize that every time we try something new, innovative, exciting and potentially life altering, there will be bugs, ghosts in the machine, and factors no one had really thought about that will appear to thwart the process. But we will not be swayed. We will work through the problems. We can smell the cheese at the end of the maze and we're going to figure it out in the end.
Off topic rant--my blogs on blogger always have completely the wrong time listed at the end. It is 11:30 pm at my house now but my blog says something around 8pm. Impossible to just be a time zone difference. I wish I knew a way to fix this. While I'm at it (fixing time), I'd see if I could give myself a few more hours in the day.