Tapped In: Virtual PD Community (in need of a facelift)

Recently, I participated in a Tapped In Virtual Field Trip with several other WMU graduate students. I had never heard of Tapped In prior to our professor assigning us this visit and was quite curious about the functionality of the site as a “virtual world for professional development.” Upon entering the website, it was hard to overcome the ‘old’ feel of the site layout and design. It felt to me like I had traveled back in time to about the year 2000 (as far as websites go).



I suppose I have high standards for site design because I am constantly investigating the best and brightest of the Web 2.0 world, but beyond being visually lacking, I also found the site navigation to be cumbersome. Despite being someone who can almost always find their way around a website, here I had that “where am I and what am I supposed to click?” feeling. On the positive note, I was greeted by a volunteer from the help desk who also quickly answered by question about how to get where I needed to be. The fact that people volunteer to staff this website is very cool and told me that there really must be some legitimate uses if others are willing to invest that much time.

After joining the chat room with the tour guide, we quickly got on our way to learning about how to ‘live and breathe’ in the TI world. Nothing was flashy, but everything worked. TI provides educators a place to chat live with other teachers who have similar needs and interests. There are groups you can join and scheduled meetings and events quite frequently. Even if you are not ‘live’ you can still access group resources such as links to useful outside sites. Some features of TI, such as the “whiteboard” need desperately to be updated to be effective. This was demonstrated by several people on the tour having difficulties locating it and posting to it.

Overall, I believe that TI is a wonderful concept. As an avid supporter of technology as a tool for professional development and Personal Learning Networks I cannot recommend this website, however. When websites are hard to navigate, it tends to push people away from technology and that would be the last thing I would want to do for my colleagues. For now, my PLN will continue to consist of blogs in my RSS, Delicious, wikis and learning networks such as Classroom 2.0. I hope that in the future TI gets a major facelift and will bring their great concept into the Web 2.0 world.