Education/StatusMeetings/2009-03-30

Mozilla Education Status Meeting - March 30, 2009

NOTE: Frank's presentation will be given through Dimdim; the meeting room is "hecker" and the ID is "mozillaeducation" (there is no meeting key).

Agenda

1. Presentation and discussion on Dimdim, WebEx, and other options for online presentations to groups. (Frank Hecker)
2. Update on planned Mozilla summer course at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (tentative). (Gregorio Robles)

Notes

People attending (in alphabetical order, with IRC nicknames):

• brahmana
• Daniel Dengate (slinky)
• Heidi Ellis
• Frank Hecker (hecker)
• Dave Humphrey (humph)
• Mark Surman (surman)
• Chris Tyler (ctyler)

For those who couldn't attend, Frank has uploaded a copy of the presentation. Also, here are some notes taken during his talk:

• DimDim presentation with slides/video from frank

• presentations to lots of people at once, like an online course.

• not looking at peer editing and collaborative tools, focus on shared presentations

• not talking about "do it yourself" with a loose collection of various tools (although we are doing this now with call + dimdim + irc)

• being able to annotate slides while presenting in dimdim

• share presentation, screen, chat/questions, etc. Can broadcast audio/video, which frank did today

• interesting to note that when people join with audio/video, they compete with the presenter (e.g. on dimdim there was feedback from the presentation coming through an attendee's mic)

• Almost all of these rely on some kind of proprietary tech (e.g., Flash)

• Two that are good now are WebEx and DimDim

• WebEx is expensive, requires Java, interface is somewhat complicated (e.g., more than DimDim). $60/month for 1 presenter at a time. It is sort of the gold standard in this space currently.

• DimDim - getting to be feature complete with WebEx, but not there yet. Runs in browser, requires presenter to install apps locally. Attendees don't have to. Uses Flash. Can get this as a VMWare Appliance.

• Screen sharing is not great, and I have to track it to find it.

• Can see a page that the presenter browse to a new page, but not see him/her interact with the page (e.g., type in it). You'd have to

• ePresence: designed for instructors and classroom use. Really meant for an institution (expensive and needs dedicated hardware).

• Other ones, OpenMeeting (not far along yet), GoToMeeting (really Windows only), MegaMeeting (costly to get started), Adobe Connect (lock into Flash, AIR), IBM Lotus SameTime, Microsoft Live Meeting (tight integration with proprietary products, like MS Office).

• Conclusions - use WebEx now, keep watching DimDim, long-term look for ways to break dependence on Flash and perhaps tie-in with advances in Firefox's media work.

• Could we work with DimDim as Mozilla and think about rich media plays?

• Skype is not good for conferences of more than a few people, (bandwidth issues, having to restart the call to join people who drop, etc).