George Siemens has been running an online conference over the recent days, and I joined in this morning before work. I got to listen to David Wiley’s talk about Openness and the Future of Education which was really great listening. This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to listen to David talk (though I’ve been a fan of his work since 2001) – and it is totally worth listening to, especially if you’re involved in educational resource development.
One thing I really had to grab were these two slides where he looks at the disconnect between typical educational environments, and typical communication environments (yellow being where education is today):
But these slides here, out of context of David’s talk really don’t do justice to the range of issues that David talks about. Copyright, learning objects, resuability, social media.. You really have to watch the Elluminate recording if you can.
I’m pretty impressed with George’s running of the show. He has set it up centrally through Moodle in such a way so as to be as painlessly open and easy to join as possible. The lay out of this moodle is efficient and easy to navigate, the recordings of the presentations are available almost directly after the talks and are easy to find once archived, and George is keeping everyone up to date with what’s happening through his blog and through email as well as a few other tricky new tools. Each day has only a few hours of talks on reasonably regular time settings (afternoon in North America time/not ungodly morning time here in NZ) making it easy to see who, what, when and where the presentations are. The talks run through Elluminate which sadly excludes many linux buddies that haven’t worked out how to get Elluminate running – but George is making the audio recordings and the screen recordings available soon.
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June 7, 2007 at 7:08 am
Ron Lubensky
I agree with you, Leigh. I’ve not been able to get up early enough from Melbourne, so only replay the Elluminate sessions. I was especially impressed not only with what David had to say, but the Lessig-style presentation that really worked.
June 7, 2007 at 12:52 pm
James Neill
ummm….so its a conference about openness and the future of education using elluminate and camstasia….scratching my head
June 8, 2007 at 1:17 am
leighblackall
LOL 🙂 good point James! You got me/them… OMG am I getting institutionalised! am I softening my critical voice!? Yes I am, gosh darn it. What sort of a future is that! where education is dependent on expensive commercial software when there are free alternatives available? Sure, Moodle is being used, great.. but the future has no LMS right?.. but at least the content is there, freely and openly available, and easy to find.
June 11, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Rajeev Arora
Leigh,
A couple of comments:
1) Elluminate should run just fine on most Linux’s – I know we formally test Red Hat and Novell. I’ve also seen friends working on CentOS and Ubuntu. All you really need to make sure is that the right Sun Java distribution is installed from http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp
2) Elluminate supports the Open Source community in a variety of ways including hosting many Moodle-moots as well as partnerships with organizations such as RemoteLearner (for Moodle) and Unicon (for SAKAI). To get folks started, we also have a completely free 3-seat version at http://www.getvroom.com. While we do need to make a living, (and hence, charge for the product in other situations) we hope that our commitment to the education community comes through in all our initiatives.
Thanks!
June 11, 2007 at 11:09 pm
leighblackall
Hi Rajeev,
What does Elluminate plan to do if/when Google offer free webconferencing? You must know that it is only a matter of time? I wonder what Elluminate’s income would be like if it was a free webservice before Google? Available for free to anyone to set up (perhaps limited to 25 seats) and Elluminate managed the recordings, building a content repository like Youtube, Slideshare, GoogleVideos etc.
A very costly venture I’d imagine – but perhaps the only way Elluminate could absorb the shock a free webconfernecing facility that is currently on the horrizon…
?
June 12, 2007 at 1:06 am
Rajeev Arora
Hi Leigh,
I can’t really comment on what we would do in the future, but I think we already have many options that fit the bill depending upon the usecase.
I mentioned the free 3-seat vRoom in the last comment. Besides that, we also have the Lite Office (if you need more seats) where prices range from $30-40/seat/month and that includes unlimited usage (including Audio). And for folks who need the power and have the budget, we have the full-fledged Academic Edition.
So, my hope is that our technology and service is worthy enough right now to justify the different price points.
As we look to the future, we are continuing our focus and investment on how to add even more value to help our customers transform teaching, learning and education – Wait till you see the cool things which will come out later this month in our V8 product – so hopefully we will stay a few steps ahead of any free offering that does crop up.