I’ve been dealing with a consistent and widespread problem in my professional life.  As a professor, you are required to have a certain amount of office hours in a week.  In addition, as a virtual professor you also need to have online office hours to satisfy the needs of those students that cannot present themselves physically in your office.  There is no question that these virtual hours are necessary, but what is the best method and technology to use?  How about we take a look at a few options that I have had experience with.

Pronto – This is may de facto educational IM program.  It works like any other instant messaging program except that is is tightly integrated with the CMS my school uses (Blackboard).  It self populates my classes each semester and provides options for voice chat.  This is actually a decent program except for two things:  students are not using it and are not contacting me when I’m in my virtual office.  Based on a down and dirty survey (in other words students complaining), even the ease of installation does not help the students get over the fact that they have to install yet another program.  For some students, even getting them to navigate Blackboard can be difficult.

Skype – While Skype is essentially the same as Pronto with better features, I shy away from it because I tend to use it more with my colleagues and family.  Has anyone tried this in a professional capacity?

The CMS – Many of the available CMS options (well as of now Blackboard it seems after the recent purchase of Angel) feature a chat function that allows one to create a virtual room for office hours.  I never really liked this with Blackboard because I had problems with it on my Mac and even my laptop now has some funky issues when I try to chat.  Ultimately, if I’m experiencing issues then I have no doubt that students are facing them as well.

Twitter – Is it possible to use Twitter to monitor office hours?  One could theoretically monitor their Twitter feed for an hour and see if any students @ them and then respond in the same manner or through a direct message.  Doesn’t quite have the same feel as a synchronous chat.

Adobe Connect (or other web conferencing software) – My school recently purchased this for our use and I am certainly going to use it to hold special lectures with my class, but can it be used for office hours?  This will be my next adventure in virtual office hours.

I’m sure there are a few more options out there (Second Life?), so let me know via the comments.  What have you found that works for you.

Finally, when should we have our virtual office hours?  I tend to try and be available in the evening after 9 PM until perhaps 11 PM, two or three nights a week.  It seems to be working except that students rarely contact me during that time and end up chatting when I get on in the morning or even in the afternoon.  It all seems very random, is there a way to effectively schedule online office hours?  Based on student tracking, I’m beginning to think that having office hours at midnight may be the best time.  Then again I do want to sleep (ask me about the IPL shifts during the overnight hours…lol).  What has worked or not worked for you?

I think I may be getting to the point that the good apps are the ones I keep using.  I guess that goes without saying though, obviously my Karma at Plurk will suffer.  So when is it too much?  When have we reached the social limit of Web 2.0?  I’m sure that one day a new app will emerge and I will try it.  I am also sure that eventually the world will end.  If it does, where should I blog about it and should I change my status on Facebook to “Gone Fishing” or “Oh damn…”

Is it the evil of Facebook and MySpace addiction? That deep craving to gain more friends than Tom or see how many seizures you can induce from flashing backgrounds. Or keeping up with all your friends and what they are doing at every second of the day. (On a side note, Twitter is not blocked and I am still able to chronicle every second of my day.) Or is the evil something worse, is it that the people in charge actually want work to be completed? Fear not, a proxy is all it takes; but I really do not need to check Facebook every minute (at least not until I really need to find out if Warren Ellis will be my friend). I think there is an easy solution, nipple shocks.

Attach electrodes to workers nipples that are connected to a switch that will trip if the worker spends more than 2 minutes on Facebook at one time or visits said sites more than 2 times in an hour. We can get our fix and the higher ups can boost productivity.  Simple and elegant with just enough sadism.