At Wimba Connect 2008 I attended a couple of sessions on Wimba (Live) Classroom which were very positive…

…in contrast to the problems Hervé Didiot-Cook and I suffered in our joint presentation that used it! Hervé was presenting from London via LSE’s Wimba Classroom but the internet connection was weak, causing him to lose contact with me and the audience in Florida.

Also, others listening in from London heard echoing whenever I spoke and a colleague in New York was unable to hear me at all. Anecdotally I also heard of one other very poor showing of Live Classroom in an official Wimba demonstration at another university. However, an earlier presentation I did to an LSE staff development session was much better so despite the problems Hervé & I experienced I’m still keen to experiment further, probably starting with a Moodle Briefing for staff in May.

Anyway, back to the positive Live Classroom sessions at the conference…

They covered the most obvious uses we have already considered: remote presentations & training, meetings, office hours & student group study areas. However, bear in mind that Wimba now see “new Pronto” as the place for the latter two with Wimba Classroom being for more formal presentations including those with external participants and any that require archiving. There are two uses for Live Classroom that I hadn’t really considered:

  1. Digital Storytelling – It might be possible for students to record and archive a presentation in Live Classroom, combining presentation, audio & video. I need to explore this further though.  Digital storytelling is in use in languages this year using a combination of Wimba voice tools and showbeyond.com
  2. Pre-recorded presentations – by using archive a lecturer could create and distribute a short presentation for students to review before a seminar etc, allowing for more discussion face-to-face in the classroom.

One session that I attended which was demonstrating an economic case for their use of Wimba over face-to face sessions for their state-wide training programmes also provided stats on how Live Classroom was reducing their carbon footprint!