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July 11, 2003 at Macromedia in San Francisco
Notes from: Where (most of) the real learning happens - CollaborationJump to: top, presenters, announcements, key concepts, or specific session notes: Meeting Presenters (and their presentations)
Announcements (Jay Cross)
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to: top, presenters, announcements, key concepts, or specific session notes: Key Concepts
Jump to: top, presenters, announcements, key concepts, or specific session notes: Session NotesCollaboration ToolsSandeep Sood, DeepSun Online environments amplify and expand social relations. The landscape is changing – 90% of projects are done through email, which is the godfather of collaboration software. How can email software be made better to facilitate higher productivity – presence awareness, which indicates whether the person you want to communicate with is on line or the device you are contacting.
How do you tell the difference between a collaborative tool and a communication tool? A communication tool doesn’t give you as much information about the person or device you are communicating with.
Product Categories
Q: How does this relate to business collaboration? Setting up a similar type of application for business organizations, conferences, etc., can broaden a conference or organization’s network exponentially. The collaborative growth using this application is such that could not be done through email, cold calling, face-to-face, etc. There are other applications that focus on locations. An example of a business related collaboration tool like friendster.com is Net Modular. Their tool also includes blogs, wikis, special interest groups, voting, polling, debates, etc. It allows members to drill down and make connections quickly. These types of social software have been around for a while. They provide a value proposition that cannot be done any other way. Email Sandeep with a cool tool to show at any of the eLearning forum. He will be demonstrating a new cool tool at each session. Either he can present it or you can present. Jump to: top, presenters, announcements, key concepts, or specific session notes: eCommunitiesMarcia Sitcoske, Cisco Cisco employees are getting away from e-reading and communicating and collaborating in e-communities. The ecommunities create learning for nontechnical people about technical topics. This enables nontechs to talk intelligently about technical products. In a company who’s products are all technical this is very important to performance, productivity, and their bottom line. The ecommunities are for internal personnel and customers.
Solutions
The ecommunities at Cisco give greater intimacy with clients, which results in better business solutions, and builds stronger client relationships. It also allows customers to talk to other customers about their product and Cisco learns from what the clients say. You need relevant and current content, integrated tools applications and services, and trusted expert advice to integrate into the above to keep the community charged and engaged. Facilitation tips – find out who your clients are that are experts and highlight them, don’t just have experts, they have to be responsive. The responses have to be timely or people will drop out of the community. The incentive the experts have to participate is in creating a solid business process. Use a close looped cycle that gets feed by the clients and their management. Community moderators take turns. A staff of people works on the moderation and keeps it going. Legal responsibilities Cisco faces when experts that say they are but may not be are dealt with by using a disclaimer. The legal department is a gate keeper for what and who gives out information. Internal metrics are used by Cisco to gauge trends and to keep everyone on the team doing what they need to do. Q: Do you have problems with competitors coming on the board? This does happen, it always happens on the internet; due diligence and disclaimers are used but you never really know who you are talking to. Accuracy and timeliness of the information is a key and critical success factor. The real value for the remote user is the value of the content. From a participant’s point of view it can influence what products they buy, when and how. Another way Cisco ensures customer satisfaction in their ecommunities is by using a rating system that gives the user the ability to measure the quality of the information. Q: How many ecommunities does Cisco have? More internally than externally though the external is much larger than any of the internal number. A popular ecommunity feature is Tech Talk: a one hour radio talk show style webcast.
Tech Talk captures the knowledge and posts it on the community for archives. MarketingCisco strategized heavily before kicking off the community, business process engineering, talking with customers through forums, talking to experts about associating with a brand. Marcia recommends the book Leveraging Communities of Practice for Strategic Advantage by Hubert Saint-Onge and Debra Wallace. The book documents her experience with the Canadian insurance company; it tells what goes into building a community. Metrics
Surveys
The Bottom LineEcommunities positively influence our relationships with our customers and lowers support costs. Jump to: top, presenters, announcements, key concepts, or specific session notes: Flash Communication ServerChris Hock, Macromedia
You can create and deploy compelling, interactive web based audio/video applications. Some of the applications are
Use of flash – a great tool for creating lightweight applications for communications – demo of how easy it is to create a lightweight application that has all of the components listed above. The application gives you an html web page with the ability to list users, audio, video that can be published to a third party or peer-to-peer. This solution gives a company the opportunity to publish very quickly, although you do need a communications server installed. It’s the drag and drop components that make it very quick and easy to start up. Flash Communication Server was used in Hong Kong to keep the students educated. It lets students attend class while classes were suspended. The lessons were done together and in real time so that students were together but not spreading germs. It helped to make life in Hong Kong as normal as possible. Before the SARS epidemic they had started creating a prototype, they dropped it two days before the SARS outbreak, then picked it back up and was up and running in two days. Q Is there interest in China? Not as much as in Hong Kong. Other interested Asian countries are Taiwan and Singapore. Q Did the majority of the students have a connection at home? Most but there was work done on the bandwidth size because they were on dial up connections. Q Are their guidelines on how to use this effectively? Users use many different types of applications to make a rounded community. It’s not the only thing or used as a standalone. Q How are live and archives coordinated? All sessions can be archived. Q How much does it cost to start using the communication server? $500/server, there are a number of hosted third parties that charge 50/month. The development tool is Flash MX Q Who is the competition? We're positioning the competition as "build it yourself with java." Q What about Greenwich? Not seeing that as much used as a development tool. People will cut and past using java – example structure is java with each add in pasted in. University of Berkeley uses it by broadcasting their class room live, they also archive them. One of the things they did quickly was set up cameras quickly and broadcast the audio and video, providing a new online learning environment. You can see slide notes, teachers’ notes; you can turn off the different features depending on your needs or likes and dislikes. Q How is the editing done? Is it easy to do on all components? Video, audio, etc. Yes, it’s very easy to edit out bloopers, blunders, dead time, etc. You can structure your event as you go along which gives the professor the ability to change what components are being displayed. If something is distracting or not given a high enough focus, the professor and the user can change those as they go along. Q How is this different from WebEx, Toolbook, etc. You can do whatever you want, not quite plug and play. Using breeze with the Flash Communication Server makes it plug and play. It’s the first business solution. Jump to: top, presenters, announcements, key concepts, or specific session notes:
Demonstration of Breeze LivePeter Ryce, Macromedia
Using quizzes is as easy as going through the wizard steps and it will track all the answers. Learning how to run a meeting is done through the help wizard. There are many features that the facilitator can use – video, audio (VoIP), ask questions, give feedback. Adding people to the room is very easy – taking the URL and sending it via email or IM, the addressee clicking on it will bring that person to the meeting. The facilitator controls all aspects. The content is delivered real time instead of sending out with each page. Facilitator can change control over to anyone at any time so that collaboration can be done in the fullest. You can use navigation like PPT as a presenter to navigate through slides; the facilitator is the only one that can see the outline view while choosing where to navigate to. More than one camera view can be done. New content can be added at any
time. It can be text, photos, etc. Breeze combined with Flash Communication Server goes beyond the conferencing solution. If presenters come unprepared you can designate a preparing presenter so that no one else can see it the preparation taking place. Q Is there a role for a person to do the production or can the presenter do it all alone? It can be done alone. There is no need for a production person. Upper management, sales, and product development have been using it with little or no documentation with a high level of success. Q What’s the price point for Breeze Live? We haven’t finalized pricing that will be released in August. Q Is the tracking SCORM compliant? Yes, data can be exported from the Flash Communication Server format to another database in a SCORM compliant format. Q Screen sharing – what are the features? The presenter can make changes at will. Q Can Voice over IP (VoIP) be used? VoIP can be used. Video can also be used but turned off at any time to focus on one or the other. Q What’s being done to make this a many-to-many tool? The notes areas is the collaborative space, the presenter can turn control over to anyone. Application sharing is cannot be done; security and sandbox issues are involved. Another feature is that a conference room can be set up in advance or for a recurring meeting so that every thing is done before you get to the conference room. Jump to: top, presenters, announcements, key concepts, or specific session notes:
Collaboration in Higher Education Universities using collaboration in higher education are measuring success
in eLearning.
Universities are realizing eLearning is a subset of the knowledge enterprise. Virtual universities are what are emerging from the collaboration between universities sharing their experiences. Four forms of collaborationIn content, such as reusable learning objects entire course for common
use Universities are using reusable learning objects for consistency and efficiency. They are building communities that share information and knowledge. ExamplesThe University of British Columbia has created ecommunities and eportofolios, which is registration info and other value proposition components. The resulting online participation shows a lot more information than a two page essay that can be used for admission criteria. University systems of North Carolina and Wisconsin are sharing functionality and courses – each has multiple campus’ that share content and technology that cuts down cost of across the board. What Drives CollaborationStudent demand – they like blended online courses 14% better than fact to fact lectures Government grants – Pew Foundation established effective ways to teach large numbers of students, which started collaboration. The faculty gets funding to develop collaborative ways of teaching large amounts of students at one time. Technology innovation funds on campuses – provides one button publishing, the University of Texas has three fourths of their classes on line. If the professor‘s content is used for more than one course they get more money for the reused content. Each school makes its own rules. It can be either owned by the school or by the faculty. Issues are dealt with by the university. Florida State’s demand for space for students turned to eLearning because it was adding 8000 students a year. To build space and add teachers for that measure of growth would be very difficult and costly. Incremental revenue is realized by going to eLearning platforms, it can offer universities the opportunity to share each other’s content to fill their needs so they don’t build courses that students need that they don’t have. High school students are seeing eLearning options in their curriculum, therefore when going into college they have already adapted to the system and environment. Growing ease of use and support for the faculty leads to acceptance of online collaboration as an acceptable learning methodology. Q What’s holding it back? The decision making process is too long. It was not largely adopted by all until just recently. Professors felt there was no way to manage the feedback from the students. The students required timely responses and the professors could not keep up with the amount of email they were getting. Q Did any of the universities develop best practices and did they share them? Yes, the most creative was the University of Adelaide, Australia, work study students taught the professors how to use the eLearning programs. Q How is the intellectual capital handled? Each school makes its own rules. Q What problem is it solving Classroom, server and budget constraints Impacts of collaboration - Students are taking two and a half courses in blended learning. Open source collaboration on functionality like uPortal will affect commercial companies with similar functionality. - Alison Armstrong
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webmaster© 2002-2004 Emergent Learning Forum
Challenges
Technology from Macromedia that aids eLearning, it’s a new class of
internet based applications that make use of video.
What is it? It starts with Breeze -- use PowerPoint (PPT)
to create a presentation then export to Breeze, which converts the presentation
to
Flash -- and adds live broadcast & collaboration features (similar to
WebEx, Placeware, etc.). The types
of
things that
can be done are testing and interactivity. Simply and accelerate training and
communication. PPT is a visual aid; breeze adds the ability to record audio
slide by slide. You can use a script from the note sections. Once you have
everything you publish it, a URL is sent to you via email within minutes and
you can send it out to a mass audience or post it on a web site for distribution
instead of sending out a large PPT file. It gives you flash content within
your PPT presentation, which changes your PPT to a flash app. You can edit
your audio easily and quickly. You can do all the editing through PPT; you
don’t have to use flash. 
Jerry Neece