This past semester one of my colleagues, and fellow co-instructor of the Instructional Design capstone project, suggested we use a new service called Pi to bring our sections together. This sounded like a great idea given that the capstone course tends to be pretty hermetic for most students, since they work on individual projects.  The separate sections also have a low number of students enrolled in each section, at least compared to regular courses, which contributed to this sense of isolation.

Some of the students in Jeffrey's section were also former students, so I thought it would be interesting to see what they were working on for their capstones.

So, Pi was something we experimented with.  It is a platform that is quite twitter-like, but without the character limitation, for classes.   While forums are great, I like the 'flow' of information of twitter, or a Facebook group, for regular off-topic discussion and course announcements.  The forums seem too formal for something like that these days as the heuristics of the internet are slowly changing.

The experience working with Pi was pretty good.  Some of the initial annoyance, like having to log into the app every single time you used it, were fixed early in the semester, and there was a Pi assistant available to us if we had any questions. They also claim it was FERPA compliant which is a big plus.  I wonder if anything else will come in to replace it...

This is the note I got the other day: