Digital Workshop

[quote="mac"]Hi there
any chance of a brief summary? i.e. did the technology work? Is it practical to use? How many joined the forum and did they find it useful? Any other info?
The concept seems to have great potential... long range job interviews, conferences etc but only if it is straightforward to use...

Mac

Four people (2 from UK, 1 from Hungary, 1 Australia) took part in the webcast. Mack was working with two monitors: one for messaging and one for running the Opus demonstration. There were a few minor technical glitches during the webcast. These related to Opus having a problem with dual monitors and a need to put new batteries in the wireless keyboard, but Mack coped very well with these minor problems. The messaging system and displays seem to be instant in the UK, but there were short time delays in the display for Steve in Australia. Messaging appeared instant on my system from all participants.

My equipment is shown at the bottom of this message. I use a 24" MIRA monitor and I am connected to the internet via an 8Mb broadband.

dimdim.com have a series of very short tutorial videos and it is well worth spending time going through these as they are well presented and give all the information you need to get started with the service. Signing up is free to use the 'Free' account. You need to carefully coordinate the meeting across different time zones. We didn't test the audio or video capability of the service. In the free service you are allocated three microphones that can be rotated around the meeting if there are more than three people attending. Video conferencing is only available in the Pro and Enterpise membership accounts. Photos on the whiteboard might be a halfway step when testing the system. The whiteboard performed well when one person was writing, but scrambled the letters when two people tried to write at the same time! This may be avoided by organising whiteboard control so that it is passed to each participant as needed. Like all meetings they benefit from having an agenda, a controller and a summary of the discussion.

This reply is solely my personal impression of the dimdim.com service. Mack and other participants may have more to add. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and was easily able to follow the tutorial provided. Apart from a few minor glitches Opus performed well in the presentation with the user interface clearly visible, all keyboard input and mouse movement shown as it was happening on Mack's computer system. In my opinion the dimdim.com service has very good potential for corporate meetings, presentation, design and development collaboration work, training and education across geographical disparate groups. I can certainly see its potential in helping developing countries access education and technology much more easily.

I would like to say a VERY BIG THANK YOU to Mack for the time and effort put into testing the service and presenting the tutorial.

Paul Conway
Sheffield, England.

Thank you so much. Well done all of you.
Looks like it is a useful tool.
cheers
Mac

I agree with Paul . It was excellent. I learnt a lot from the exercise. Although time zones was a problem with me - even working out what GMT was compared to our time. I always thought we were 9 hours a head but in fact were 10 hours. My first experience with a web conference - I enjoyed it.

Steve

From a host and a teaching perspective, it was a very interesting exercise. It was semi ad-hoc, the topic having been chosen from a problem posted by another forum user and fleshed out slightly to provide a reasonable amount of teaching material.

Like most things that are taught, it's always much quicker to simply tell or provide the solution rather than complete a live working example but I think that seeing even a task as short as this built in real time provides more understanding that the aforementioned methods.

The technology to achieve this worked surprising well. Having worked with remote assist programs (PC Anywhere) and previous found them rather sluggish in response, it was pleasant to hear that the screen casting was smooth enough to learn from.

As explain above, I ran the session from two monitors - the reason being that cast, IMHO was better suited to a full screen 1024 x768, but I still wanted to view the DD controls and message boxes. This set-up also allowed me to see the cast as another participant which was both helpful and disconcerting.

The helpful aspect was that, whilst most of us intuitive do something, this is too fast for a decent lesson. Physical teaching allows you to gauge the understand through eye-contact, but modelling via this technology it's too easy to move too fast. By using the dual set-up you can pace the lesson more effectively.

However, it's disconcerting because your eyes are constantly switching between the control screen and the observing screen. But having tried to run a cast on a single screen - I opt for this any time. The possible alternative, is to activate the audio functions but again without the feedback of the screen screen, you could easy over pace or miss a problem.

Personally, I would love to see some annotation tools for the cast that allowed highlighting, text, etc overlayed. Opus - makes it fairly easy to do this anyway, but a built in system would be nice as well.

From a technology side, I was running this from a quad machine (4x3.2Ghz) with two cores allowed to the second (virtual machine). Both used XP SP3 and each had access to about 1.5GB of memory. Everything ran smoothly even when the screen recording of the VM was activated as a test.

The graphic is a humble 8600 and the VM driver which unlike some VM machines coped extremely well with the casting. The crash with Opus, was not a VM issue but a problem Opus has when you play around with the graphics set-up whilst the program is running causing the memory exception error. It's simply avoid by activating the casting session before running Opus, I simply forgot. It is feasible to use a physical multiple monitor set-up to run DD casting but you must have a specific configuration an DD will only cast one of the monitors. I simply chose a VM solution as IMHO it was cleaner than messing around with settings on a machine used for commercial development.

The other glitch was failure of the batteries in my wireless keyboard. Oddly, I always keep a wired mouse nearby in case of this problem, but the keyboard fails so rarely that it wasn't a foreseen problem. It's not a major issue, but does make you realise that you need to be thoughtful for a problem with the system in general.

Is it usable? I think the answer is yes. I could see this being used both for ad-hoc and commercial solutions. It's easy to quickly prepare a short lesson and model this on screen but with some thought you could develop more sustained activities that required greater interaction.

Oddly, having just given a presentation last week on e-learning - it depends on where on that well known cycle you place the lesson - ad-hoc style would be very much an 'absorb' lesson but with a developed curriculum and experienced or regular users - it could move cleanly in to a 'do' type lesson or course - but IMHO this would require a greater exploration and perhaps development of the interactive side of the technology. I can certainly see why it's been link with Moodle.

Maybe if people are willing, we'll try a more two way approach next time - where a concept is taught (absorb) and a problem is posed (do). This would allow the participants to evaluate whether DD could help support the learning though the more constructive messaging & teacher demonstration and or handing casting control over the 'student'.

Mack

Mack,

You can count me in on your next dimdim.com webcast.

Paul

Hello Mack! I regret not having seen any of the conferences. I changed my address and the region where I live now there is no connection to broadband Internet. Outside not understand well the problem of scheduling, I am with my GMT Brazil Brazil in the 3:00. I do not know how to adjust it. Sorry to be losing valuable tips and exercises on this very interesting program. In any case, thank you for the invitation I solve my problem of connection so you can participate in its conferences. Grateful.

Cheers Nilson,

It was an interesting experience and I will try and organise another session. I think we're going to look at randomisation.

Mack