Terry’s Blog

Thanks to my Twitter friends and FOATF I have discovered DimDim . These are a few notes on my first experiment. DimDim is a (still beta) free web conferencing system that can be used by signing up for the hosted service or the OS code can be downloaded and installed locally. To host a meeting the host’s computer needs a small browser plugin installed but attendees do not need this. Everyone needs the Flash plugin, version 9 or above.

Once you have registered with DimDim any number of meetings can be scheduled in advance or one can be started immediately on an ad hoc basis. Invitations are sent out by email. The email provides a link to the meeting and details of the agenda, scheduled time and so on. However, the email does not provide logging in details and any one who obtains the link to the meeting would be able to attend. When an invited attendee clicks on the link it takes them to a joining page that has already filled in their email and the name of the meeting. They just need to enter a screen name to enter. Any email address can be entered here so the meeting url can be sent to any one or made into a link on a web page or in a blog post.

Before letting you in DimDIm does a check of your browser and version of Flash. If it not 9 or above you can install at this point.

Once in there you can see a list of attendees. The main area can be used for viewing the host’s desktop and any applications being run, a Powerpoint or PDF file, or a Whiteboard. This is controlled by the host. There is an option to chat with all - opens chat area - or initiate private chats with any of the attendees. Chat and audio can be disabled for individuals by the host.

If the full screen option is chosen this makes the maximum space available for viewing an application or presentation but some scrolling is required by the viewer to see the whole of the application window unless the host has sized and positioned it on their desktop to fit what area the viewer can see. In effect this puts some contol of the scrolling that is necessary in the hands of the host. If the viewer needs to scroll this can be guided by the host via audio or text communication. The system provides audio and video communication. To share an application the host has to minimse the DimDim meeting window so is not able to see what viewers can see. Control of applications or slides cannot be handed to viewers but they can collaboratively use the whiteboard and annotate slides. Switching between these desktop, slides and the whitebaord is a single click. The screen refresh on viewers’ screens is not bad but there is an inevitable lag.

It looks like a maximum of 20 attendees are possible and only 3 of these can share the microphone (i.e. use the audio channel).

I have tried DimDim this by running my PC as host and a laptop logged in as an attendee. I couldn’t use sound as the feedback nearly brought the plaster of the ceiling!

One possible use of this is as an alternative to Skype meetings. Skype allows multiple users to talk, text and video but all participants need to be registered Skype users and have Skype installed on their PCs. With DimDIm only the meeting’s host PC needs an installed client. In addition there is the facility to share documents and applications.

I am thinking of testing it by running a session(s) for introducing LeedsBlogs, our Elgg installation, to new users to demonstrate the basics of posting, joining a community blog, uploading files, embedding files and images, what ‘friends’ are for, tagging, use of access levels, creating bespoke access lists and using them and so on. Or run LeedsBlogs help desks, or a master class, perhaps….

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I have nearly finished Clay Shirky’s new book ‘Here Comes Every Body‘ that is being much commented on in the blogosphere at the moment. For me at least it helps make quite a lot of sense of the current explosion of social networking, web 2.0 developments and the renewed interest in open source software. It has given me a great deal to think about and it will take some time to work through the significance of many of the issues explored, particularly in the context of HE institutions in the UK. I’ll just mention for now two of the things that struck me immediately of interest, starting with a quote from page 249 on the risk averse behaviour of large organisations

In business, the investment cost of producing anything risks creating a systematic bias in the direction of acceptance of the substandard. You have experienced this effect if you have ever sat through a movie you didn’t particularly like in order to ‘get your money’s worth”. The money has already gone, and whether you continue to watch Rocky XVII or not won’t change the fact. [...] Curiously in that moment many people choose to keep watching the movie they have already decided they don’t like, partly as a way to avoid admitting they’ve wasted their money. So it is in many organisations. The systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.

This applies to the protection of large scale investments and the prohibitive costs of doing something else once the system is in place and embedded. Examples would include investment in VLEs where a great deal of time and other resources have been invested in staff development, fixes and fiddles to make it do what you want it to do (sadly this often means changing your methods and procedures to fit the technology - A about F as far as I’m concerned), and for many a large personal emotional investment in the system.

Another thing that I found particularly interesting was Shirky’s report on some research on originality and ‘good’ ideas within organisations. The methodology, at least as reported, seemed reasonably OK. The most consistent source of innovative and useful ideas are individuals and groups that operate across and therefore partially outside of specifically functional groups. In general terms they can see the broader context but at the same time understand the purposes and needs of the narrower functional groups as well as the strategic objectives and needs of the wider organisation. These individuals have a wider spread of links and more connections between groups. Within the more compact and focussed functional groups the exchange of ideas has something of the character of being in an echo chamber of accepted ideas, customary and implicit attitudes and procedures and a natural tendency to reinforce the comfort zone and the status quo. This is a bit of a gloss, influenced by what i see going on around me, but I think is in the spirit of the report.

This seems to me an argument for developing networks and making it possible for staff to operate or at least think outside their particular silos. I’m sure the social network we now have at my University, based on Elgg,  is making a valuable contribution to this end already. It is also an argument for looking at how units already working across the whole University can contribute to innovation, like the staff development and support units, educational technologists, Library staff and teams and no doubt others. It also is an argument for secondments and internal sabbaticals.

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Chris Sessums posted two days ago on what makes his personal learning environment. Academics tend to think more in terms of research and scholarship rather than learning which is both a pity and a mistake. I have for sometime been trying to persuade academic colleagues that they, just like our students, are first and foremost learners. OK, hopefully we are pretty competent learners, even perhaps expert learners, and our students are generally still learning to be learners, sort of ‘apprentice’ learners. But I think the learning to learn business doesn’t end for any of us these days, not even academics.

Chris invited us to tell what our personal learning environments consist of. Here goes a first shot at it.

Text books, research monographs and papers, libraries, journals, newspapers, TV and radio news, RSS feeds from selected news and information sources (e.g. BBC, Earthwire, CommonDreams, Union of Concerned Scientists, RealClimate, etc…).  Google Scholar.

Novels, films, TV and radio documentaries. Biographies, autobiographies, political, economic and history books. Friends and family. Listening to my wife.

Conferences. Conference bars. Staff development events in my Uni. Email correspondence with colleagues.

LeedsBlogs (Elgg based social community). Lurking in a number of Ning communities. Eduspaces. A fairly extensive, mainly educational, blog roll.

I’m sure I can add to this with a bit more thought and imagination. Like Chris says, it’s all networks of one sort or another. Even to engage with a journal article is to enter into some sort of dialogue with the author, their status, reputation and the context in which they wrote the article. For me it is always engagement and dialogue with others, face-to-face, on-line, synchronously, asynchronously, or with the words of past generations. Marx, Weber and Durkheim, Foucault, Chomsky and Alan Bennett are all nodes in the networks that make up my personal learning environment.

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This January I gave a presentation on ‘blending research and learning ecologies’ at the Leeds University 5th Learning and Teaching Conference . I only had 30 minutes and as usual tried to do way too much. The few questions I left time for were very good and, again as usual, I thought I performed better in the freestyle of Q&As than I did in the formal presentation. Trying to make sense of stuff in discussion with others seems to be more comfortable and natural somehow. Anyway, gratifyingly, the feedback collected on the session by the conference organisers turned out to be pretty good and I have been asked to write an 800 word version for the University’s Learning and Teaching Journal. Only 800 words! Clearly they don’t know me very well. I’ll do my best however. Just in case anyone is interested I’ll post it here too.

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I have recently been helping some colleagues in our Life Long Learning Centre to set up a discussion boards for tutors to share ideas on good teaching practice. We are using an OS product called phpBB installed and administered by our central web team. I thought the system pretty good and have now got an installation of my own to explore.

Use of discussion boards seems to be on the increase again and I wonder if this is a sort of backlash against the relative complexity and time commitment of using communications tools based on blogging functionality. As a great fan of social networking and systems like Elgg and Ning, I have spent the last few years encouraging colleagues to use these in preference to the old fashioned, heavily structures, largely text based threaded message forums. But, for some things, I have found discussion boards in our VLE and Student Portal, the Forums here in Eduspaces (once upon a time) and those available in Ning groups more effective and significantly easier to use. I am gradually forming a better idea of what systems like Elgg are good for and what is better suited to focused threaded discussion. I hope to turn this into some sort of guidelines/best practice document, probably collaboratively written in a Google doc in due course. I would be grateful for any thoughts on this and any observations on your own experience, dear Reader, of the two different systems.

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