Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

First DimDim online meeting: Debriefing Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Summer09 Workshops

This evening I used DimDim for the first time to host and lead an online meeting, and the results were very positive overall. This was a “facilitator debrief” for our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project, discussing guidelines for co-facilitators and lead facilitators, as well as lessons learned from our summer workshops to date. The free version of DimDim allows you to have one person sharing video at a time, and up to three people using the microphone to talk. There was quite a bit of echo on the call when more than one person had their microphone activated, so it was important for me as the host to turn off the “hands free” microphone option when others were talking. We created the presentation deck for the call in Google Documents in advance of the workshop. I downloaded that as a PowerPoint file and uploaded it into DimDim just prior to our online meeting, and it worked GREAT to share that presentation file during the online meeting. Here’s the link to the recorded DimDim session, which was just over one hour in length and is 90 MB in size. The recording is a FLV file, which I’ve also downloaded to archive in case DimDim doesn’t host the presentation for us indefinitely. DimDim doesn’t provide embed code for this archived recording, but did email me as the meeting host following the conference with links to both the session recording and archived text chat.

We had eight people in the webconference tonight, and could have had up to 20 with a free DimDim account. We used the backchannel text chat feature quite a bit, and as I’ve found with Elluminate it was even more valuable to use than the shared microphone option. Here’s an archived version of our session text chat.

The only thing I might have changed was letting people know in advance that they should connect a microphone to their computer so they could verbally participate. All our co-facilitators have “digital backpacks” of digital storytelling equipment including a Platronics headset, so they all have microphones, but I hadn’t thought to remind people to have microphones connected when they joined the webconference tonight.

Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Summer 2009 Workshops: Faciltator Debrief

I hosted this free, online webconference in DimDim using the FireFox browser on my Mac laptop. When I clicked to stop the recording and was prompted to save it as an archive, my browser froze up for some reason and I had to force-quit it. The archived recordings and text transcripts were still saved, however, and I was/am able to locate the recordings following the workshop thanks to the follow-up email I received. There was NOT a link to the archives in my online DimDim account.

In the call I referenced the Creative Commons video “A Shared Culture”, the project “Unmasking the Digital Truth,” and the Texas STaR Chart.

Woo hoo for DimDim! I like it! 🙂


Visit Celebrate Oklahoma Voices!

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One response to “First DimDim online meeting: Debriefing Celebrate Oklahoma Voices Summer09 Workshops”

  1. Kevin Micalizzi, Dimdim Web Conferencing Avatar

    Wesley-

    Thanks for sharing how you’re using Dimdim. Having your attendees use headsets will prevent the microphones from picking up the sounds coming from your speakers — preventing that echo.

    You can embed the recording. When you are viewing the recording, click the box in the lower right of the player and you can get the embed codes. At this time we don’t have any restrictions on the number of recordings or the length of time they are maintained. That may change, but at this time I’m not aware of any specific plans.

    Thanks!

    -k
    Kevin Micalizzi, Community Manager
    Dimdim Web Conferencing
    e: kevin@dimdim.com
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