The next test of nodenogg.in was with the returning Year 3 Games Design & Art students we had a slighly updated version of nodenogg.in however I disabled the spatial view as this had connection and arrangement issues and so I just displayed the shared text list view. In this first test of the new academic year I replaced my previous use of an etherpad with nodenogg.in which is also why I was happy with testing just the list text view.
Students where presenting three themes they had been researching in a 8minute presentation while all the other students where encouraged to connect to nodenogg.in and respond live with text commentary to the presentation. Students had to select one theme to take forward and deep dive into. So other students were also encouraged to vote.
Students appreciated this approach as they tried to help each other with ideas to follow up the theme and which theme to select. We could have just as easily used etherpad or word online, but these don’t offer the simple anonymous approach and wouldn’t test nodenogg.in to see what works and what was still causing usability issues. In this version after each presentation I had to copy and paste the responses into a text document as the system only had the capability to connect to a hardcoded instance.
Main take aways
- unlike etherpad students couldn’t all write together as list view showed each student as a block
- students didn’t like to create more that one thing they just typed
- no styling or use of line breaks which was not good
- there was not easy was to vote against current text again due list view being blocks
- spatial view and connections may resolve the above