I’m in my second Web 2.0 Un-conference session: An Overview of Vyew, a Flash-based collaborative workspace that allows conference calls, chatting, threaded discussions, etc. Vyew = “instant workspaces.” The setup for Vyew has been researched and supported by Dr. Henry Lim, a Ph.D. at Stanford, with an ongoing evaluation of e-learning resources at the center.
Here are some Vyew features and concepts:
- promotes active responses – which could, for instance, play out as students synchronously responding to and agumenting a PowerPoint as teacher is presenting.
- Vyew is highly visual, which enhances memory coding in brain (hey, that connects with Hall Davidson’s presentation)
We’ve looked at some pretty amazing examples of med school students working on a PBL task. Students can work on same page, or on separate pages and then sync back up later to share compare. The developers are fine-tuning right now the ability of the instructor to unsync/sync projects to make it easier to track individual student’s input.
The question about control over “malicious deletion” is being addressed. A = think about the permission settings – collaborator vs. viewer, for instance.
Compared to a wiki, which is linear, Vyew is contextual, visual, and non-linear. And the concept mapping tools look very good. And wait, you can pull Auto Cad files in too. Oh, and upload videos.
Gail
Thanks for your sharing out here.
It is valuable for me, way back on the East Coast.
🙂
Kevin
Kevin, as soon as I have a moment to do some reflecting and unpacking of the Saturday sessions, I’ll post about Diigo. I don’t know if you’ve looked at this application, but is seems like a powerful tool for promoting active reading with our students. More later,
Gail
Very interesting stuff. I’ve been reading some lately about how web 2.0 has affected many traditional websites and the example in your previous post about Amazon is a great case of this.
At my day job, we have been using traditional web conferencing and I’ve wondered how we could be more interactive during these sessions. We still accomplish so much more when we are face-to-face. Vyew sounds like it is bringing much more interactivity to web communication. Thanks for sharing what you are learning at this conference.
You are very welcome, Jim. It was a great “un-conference.” Even more exciting than Vyew, the presentation on Diigo was pretty amazing. I’ll blog later on this tool – as soon as I get my brain wrapped around it.
For tips on how to make your videoconferencing more interactive, check out Janine Lim’s Out on a Lim site. Somewhere on the site she has posted a great guide for internactive videoconferencing. Let me know if you can’t find it and I’ll find the links for you.
Welcome to the blogosphere,
Gail
Thanks for the tip. I found the site and it is a wealth of videoconferencing information. Thanks.