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.