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Tag Archives: undergraduate
Omnium – great collaborative online space
This is a great product developed here in Australia by the University of NSW, College of Fine Arts (COFA) about 5 years ago. http://omnium.net.au/
I like their metaphors for the different spaces. Each student has a “filing cabinet” which is their personal files.
To share these they “publish” them to “The Wall” which is a shared gallery space for the equivalent of your workgroup/workspace, where you can add comments. This works best when the files are images or video (which is what it was designed for, developed by/for the College of Fine Arts.) Then if the teacher thinks your work is great, they can publish it to a “Class Wall” for the whole class to see.
The best work in the class can be published to a Public Wall, ie a virtual art gallery space that anybody can view. Great promo/marekting for COFA.
Would you like to be able to promote your student work in this way? With their permission of course…
Elluminate VCF screenshots
This is a screen shot taken from a Camtasia movie of Elluminate VCS fron their website: http://www.elluminate.com/Products/Elluminate_VCS/?id=74/
The shot on the left shows 4 people having a live session from home on what the website calls “low-end broadband.” Specifically, the video says that each participant is sending 162-200 kilobits of data per second (kb/s) and that they are receiving a total of 700 kb/s in order to see all 4 participants on their screen. This is not a high bandwitch requirement.
The right-hand screen-shot shows 2 people in a virtual class sessions collaborating on an xls file.
Ning Social networks in teaching
Currently there are 3 undergrad classes that I’m aware of that use Ning as an entire learning environment, after a trial use by one class last session.
Ning lets anybody create their own social network and you can have sub-networks or special interest groups inside each network, which usually has a theme. I explored one called “Classroom 2.0”
After navigating thorugh to this network from an “education” themed newtwork i clicked on a network called “Classroom 2.0” and then i clicked on a “visit” link to go there. Once inside (ie on the Classroom 2.0 homepage) it looked remarkably like a WordPress blog. I wondered if it was based on WordPress with some additional code to create a visual clustering and linking between the different sites.
Can anybody comment on what exactly the students like about this particular site/network? How do they use it to stay in touch? Is it particularly easy to link through to find friends’ contributions?
It certainly was easy to set up a new network, see images below you just name and pick a url, theme and colour scheme, and drag and drop the items/features to set the layout.
And here is what it looked like after i’d set it up. Empty. But ready to roll.
