James Franklin :: Blog :: Web conferencing - dimdim

Well first, "long time no blog". I've actually had quite a bit to blog about - a trip back to the UK where I went to the Japanese embassy for a day and a conference in Brighton amongst other things. But for some reason I just didn't fire up the blog, so all that goes unreported. If I find the notes from these events then I may blog about them at a later date.

But I've had my interest to do something sparked up again.

I've not yet used Adobe Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze), however, I've heard good things about it. Some of my issues with it as a concept though are its closed source nature and also the image behind it being one that has very little to do with education.

For instance - its features page suggests such nuggets as branding, course management, curriculum management, reports, manager reports and certification. These are of course all useful - however, they actually have little or no purpose in education (that means education as in learning - not the administrative part of education that is reponsible for churning people through the treadmill).

So overall I've been put off even looking into Adobe Connect. The price is nowhere to be seen - however, it is available if you have Adobe contact you - that means its probably very expensive. I'm also not happy with Adobe's education pricing for CS3. Macromedia Studio 8 was approximately £70, while it is still sold at this price - it is being replaced by "Adobe CS3 Web Standard" which costs £163.63. That's right MORE THAN DOUBLE the price before! So the idea that educational (non corporate) institutions should buy into Adobe products like connect would seem like a big mistake financially.

So, I was quite impressed to find DimDim. Okay, the name is stupid - especially given the education context. But it is opensource and has a development team behind it. They have structured their paid service into the hosted solution, giving away the server/client side of the software. The features currently present are:

Presentation (converts ppt to flash - on the fly - and presents to other users.
Audio/video sharing - works well (but audio quality was poor)
Application sharing: Full screen - displays on other screens (a bit slow - but works)
Chat - both to group and privately

Now this doesn't sound overly impressive - but it installed like a dream and looked very nice and professional - both important points for a new opensource project. The feature list of the product they want to be releasing is far more impressive though:

Document sharing - for interactive collaboration of documents
White board and Annotations - group drawing/doodles in margin - ability to annotate on documents and brainstorm!
polls - set polls that all participants can respond to
question manager - Q&A for a whole class in realtime.

The points above all have educational benefits and tick all the boxes for "assessment for learning" etc. Much more, I believe that they could actually improve education and enjoyment/participation in it.

The final cherry on the cake though is that they are trying to integrate the system with Moodle - and I've seen screenshots of someone who has this working with a Moodle activity.

This means that you can set a combined meeting with brainstorming, polls, demonstrations and chat all as just one small part of a lesson! No need to worry about usernames or passwords either. And other than bandwidth/data transfer - no cost whatsoever.

It must be noted that this software is still in beta - and their roadmap suggests significant delays (possibly 6 months). But this looks like something worth waiting for. I would certainly expect it to be stable and ready for integration in time for September 2008.

Now just imagine September 2008, walking into a school which has Moodle 2.0, Elgg and DimDim all working and integrated together. Tell me that any of the other "learning platform" providers will be providing a more useful set of tools (for educational not administrative purposes).