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The Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning is recognized internationally for the quality and integrity of its program. Each year the conference provides an exchange of current resources, research, and best practices from around the world that are relevant to the design and delivery of distance education/training.

 
When: August 5-8, 2008
Where: Madison, Wisconsin

 

Adobe announced yesterday that version 7 will ship next month. With it will be a building block for Blackboard. We are planning to work with Faculty Development to do a side-by-side comparison of Wimba and Adobe Connect this summer. I hope we will get representation from faculty and staff across campus to participate in the comparison, so that we can provide the NIU community with the best desktop videoconferencing solution.

To date we have 50 faculty and staff piloting Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional. Of those 50 users 20 are from the College of Education, ETRA department. Feedback has been very positive and we will be sharing the results of our survey soon. NIU eLearning Services became interested in Adobe Connect several years ago while working with faculty from several other institutions on a grant proposal. We then asked our College of Business, who was an early adopter of Adobe Connect, if we could get a login account on their server to demonstrate the application to some of our faculty who teach online.

Let me give you some history on Adobe Connect. It was originally developed by Macromedia and called Breeze. Adobe bought out Macromedia several years ago and renamed the product Adobe Acrobat Connect. This desktop videoconferencing tool is very easy to use and does not require the user to have any special software on their computer to use it at the basic level. The only requirement is a browser with a Flash plugin. It runs off of Flash which is needed to browse most websites these days and since Adobe also owns Flash there is no risk of one update interfering with the other, as there is with Java based applications.

The application is very flexible in that it allows for just about any kind of communication you can imagine. Do you want to see who is already in the meeting space and have a sidebar chat? You can do that. Do you want to talk using voice over IP, you can do that too. How about using your web cam so that your expressions can be communicated, or share an application on your desktop, or poll the audience for feedback… yes, yes, yes. In addition one of the most amazing capabilities of Adobe Connect is the ability to have small group discussions using any combination of voice and video. In my doctoral seminar we have had 12 students using VoIP to discuss our weekly assigned paper, and during those classes we have experienced very few problems (more often problems are associated with individual’s audio setup, not the bandwidth). Some of us had web cams so you could see us, some didn’t and that was okay too. In one case a student was sitting in Starbucks and it happened to be very noisy so he listened in to our discussion but posted his comments in the chat.

On top of all these capabilities the entire meeting can be recorded for later playback. So if you miss a class or a meeting, no problem, you can watch and listen later.

 
Please feel free to comment on this blog. We would like to hear from you.

Links for more information: http://elearning.niu.edu/collaborative/connect.shtml

The following are notes taken from the IBHE Web Accessibility Consortium Webinar led by Jon Gunderson of the University of Illinois on 11/27/07.

 Link to the presentation: http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/presentations/2007-11-ibhe/pres/slide1.html

Accessibility benefits everyone, including people with disabilities. The design strategies  and standards we use to make web content accessible to those with disabilities also benefit users of other technologies (PDA, mobile, etc).

How do we ensure and monitor campus wide compliance participation at NIU?

How is web Accessibility addressed in our Strategic Plan? 

Reporting requirements beginning in 2009

 

Provide InformDation on Web Accessibility Improvements and Plans for your Institutions

• Define your accessibility requirements.
• List the evaluation tools and procedures you use to evaluate accessibility of web resources at your institution.
• List the web sites that were brought into compliance to your web accessibility requirements during the past year.
• List the web sites you plan to bring into compliance to your web accessibility requirements during the next year.

 Six months to implement IITAA once it is approved in early-mid January, 2008

 Universal Web Design Workshop: http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/courses/2day/

This is my opening blog. Nothing really to post yet, but hope is to turn this into a more vital, informative, and useful resource to our clients on and off campus. In the future I will post information and links about web analytics, user-centered design, accessibility and more.

Thanks for stopping by.

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Someone had asked if Adobe Connect supported face tracking. It works with my Logitech webcam. Just turn your webcam's face tracking feature on and it should work with Connect. Your webcam and webcam software must support face tracking this is not an Adobe Connect feature.

I realized today that by monitoring your 'Interests' and 'Main Skills' fields on your profile page you can find other people with similar interests and skills on the NIU Social Network. Both fields on your profile are made up of a series of tags (keywords). The network will generate tags (keywords) when you enter your interests and main skills as comma separated lists. If your entry becomes a hyperlink on your profile page, then it means someone else has used this tag elsewhere in the network. By clicking on the link you can find other people, communities, and resources that share your interests or skills.

What is Tagging?

I suppose we can blog about Adobe Connect here, huh? 

Feed readers, also know as news readers or aggregators, allow you to automatically collect updates from websites once you have a subscription. Not all websites have this feature, but it is becoming increasingly popular, especially with sites that have frequent updates. For more information on feeds see:

That Little Orange Icon
What are Feeds?

Some feed readers are desktop apps and others are online services. Bloglines is an example of an online feed reading service.

The NIU Social Network also has a feed reader function found under "Your Resources". You can share your favorite feeds with everyone on the network by adding them to your resource list.

I would suggest trying a few different readers and see which one works best for you. If you are looking for one that you can access from anywhere I would go with an online service like Bloglines or Google Reader. You should also know that most readers allow you to export your feeds list for easy transport to another feed reader.

The NIU Social Network has a few search tools to help you find people, communites, and resources on the network.  If you are new to the network try checking the Homepage for help.  Also, at the top of each page there is a search box, for typing in keywords, the browse button, for looking though the directory, and the tag cloud, for finding popular tags.  Another way to find information is to use our friends.  Other people in the network can be your most powerful resource. 

What is this little orange icon?  This icon lets you know that there is a feed available.  On the NIU Social Network many feeds are available for users to help them track updates to resources on the network.  Our network lets you subscribe to users blog feeds, users file feeds, users profile feeds, and tag feeds.  The icon is placed near the resource to let you know that a feed is avaiable.  Pay close attention to the URL associated with the feed because it will give you a hint about what resource is attached to the feed.  If you are unfamiliar with feeds read my blog post on feeds.