Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff2003: collaborative e-learning

Current session: Collaborative E-Learning, presented by Samuel Wan, of samuelwan.com.

With the advent of Flash Communication Server, developers now have the opportunity to redefine the concept of distance learning. FlashCom technology is exciting in its depth and potential, but designers of collaborative environments also face new challenges in accommodating shifting models of social interaction and pedagogical processes. This session will explore both the technical and social issues discovered by AIUOnline’s team of education specialists, human-computer specialists, and multimedia designers.

Wan introduced a nifty implementation of Flash Communication Server MX for the educational sector, with a “live classroom” that incorporated a Power Point presentation (exported slide-by-slide to WMF, then imported into successive Flash keyframes), a chat room, and a sketchpad.

“Let’s add more stuff. Because more stuff is always good.”

He followed up with a “proximity chat” application that graphically plots chat room participants, and then lets people text-chat with folks nearby. If someone’s using a microphone, the volume of the sound varies depending on your proximity to that user.

Wan was able to build these applications (functional versions, not super-pretty versions) in 20 minutes or less. I can only hope I’ll find it as easy to implement if I ever give it a try. ;) Most of the components he made were custom-made or adapted by him, and he said he would make those components available for free.

Wan has posted his lecture notes to echotap.com. The source files should be available by next week.

He also briefly talked about third-party components and tools that he’s found useful, including:

Wan had a few technical difficulties during the presentation, between the forgetfulness that can happen when you’re demonstrating something step-by-step to a large audience, and the server crashes that can happen when everyone in the auditorium hits the Flash you’ve just uploaded, all at the same time. He ended up having to run the proximity chat part of his demonstration off his laptop.