This evening I participated in an hour and a half of training online with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Darren Kuropatwa, and Lani Ritter-Hall in the synchronous, online environment Elluminate.
WOW!
What an AMAZING environment. I have worked extensively in WebCT, very little in Blackboard, a bit in MacroMedia Breeze, some in Windows Live Meeting, and briefly in Vyew. Elluminate as a synchronous, interactive environment takes the cake from what I have seen and know at this point about these sorts of environments. It was a real treat to have Cheryl provide Darren, Lani and I with a tour-de-force of the capabilities of Elluminate in advance of our upcoming K-12 Online Fireside Chat this Thursday at 6 pm US Central Time with week 1 keynoters Bud Hunt and Alan Levine. Last week for the preconference keynote fireside chat with David Warlick, we had 50 participants (our maximum limit at that time) – 178 people total tried to get into the event. (If you missed it, an online archive of the full event saved from Elluminate is available.) Unless some of those were repeats, that means that over 100 people were turned away because of the participant limit we had at that time. This week, I have no idea how many people will show up but Elluminate has agreed to allow an UNLIMITED number of people in– so this could be quite interesting! In fact, I think it is guaranteed to be interesting!
If you can, please make plans to join in the dialog and the fun! Darren, Lani and I will be helping Sheryl moderate by “giving voice” to questions posted in both the direct messaging (text chat) area of Elluminate as well as the interactive whiteboard spaces. We’ll be pre-loading more whiteboards this time to hopefully facilitate guestbook signatures as well as question posting. Several of us will be checking in an hour early for people who want to get in early, check their microphones, and explore in the environment. Read Sheryl’s full post on updates from today for more details!
My learning curve as a volunteer convener for this event has been quite steep, but I am loving this opportunity. It will be exciting to not have a cap on how many Elluminate participants we have for the Fireside chat on Thursday! The global conversation continues!
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Comments
3 responses to “Elluminate moderation: First impressions”
Hi Wesley…
Eluminate is very cool indeed. However it is not inexpensive. I was quoted a10 user license at $10K a year. Howerver, there are blocks now created that will allow Moodle users to incorporate Eluminate direclty into their Moodle sites. This would be very nice!
A possible solution, and one I hope to test out shortly, is an opensource project called DimDim, http://www.dimdim.com.
I have not used it but it looks very similar to Eluminate. They have an alpha out that runs on both Windows and Linux. Now, where did I leave that extra Linux server? 😉
Have you tired the intergration of Elluminate in Blackboard? The opensource project called dimdim is great for the fact that it is free and easy to use. Have you heard if this tools will become a building block for Blackboard?
No I haven’t– Thanks for letting me know about Dimdim. My only experiences with Elluminate was during the K-12 Online Conference. I’m not in the loop on development for Blackboard. I do think commercial course management solutions should attempt to integrate open source solutions, so hopefully developers will work in that direction.