DimDim Meeting with Wayne Mackintosh

Guest post by FO2010 participants Claire Thompson and Malcolm Lewis.

Meeting with Wayne Mackintosh in DimDim

As Sarah mentioned in her blog post for this week, our online session will be with Dr. Wayne Mackintosh. The meeting is scheduled for Friday, September 10th at 11am (World Clock). The session will be held in DimDim rather than Elluminate. Yes, now that you were just getting comfortable in Elluminate it's time to try something new!

Meeting Time: Friday, September 10th at 11am (World Clock) New Zealand Time.

Meeting Place: Claire's DimDim room https://my.dimdim.com/claireproonline

Malcolm Lewis and Claire Thompson are facilitating the meeting this week. DimDim is new to both of us, and for Wayne too I believe. Sarah is away this week and Bronwyn will be taking her place. With so many of us being new to DimDim it could prove to be an interesting session! DimDim is a similar e-space to Elluminate. It's different enough to be really interesting.

Preparation

Before you join this week's FO2010 session, we recommend that you try out DimDim. We would suggest that if you have time, that you set up a free DimDim account and have a play around. Invite someone to a meeting in your DimDim e-space.

Sarah put together an introduction to DimDim here. In it she links to information about joining, hosting, scheduling, and starting a meeting in DimDim as well as what to do while you are in a meeting. Below is a short screencast that Claire created on using DimDim. We recommend that you take a look at it before this week's session.

Claire will also be online in her DimDim room on Monday, September 6th at 7:30 pm her time (World Clock) for about an hour; please feel free to join her and to get a feel for what a DimDim meeting is like.

To join this week's meeting you do not need to have an account and you do not need to download anything onto your computer. You just need to click on the meeting room link.

For Wayne's FO2010 session, we will make the DimDim room available about 30 minutes prior to the start time so that people can come in early and get settled in. You will not be able to enter the room until Claire is signed in (as it is her room) so if for some reason she's having technical difficulties--there may be a bit of a delay.

Get Your Typing Fingers Ready

When we (Malcolm and Claire) tried out DimDim we found that there were big delays with the audio. As a result we will probably just have Wayne with audio and the rest of us will have to utilize the chat and the white board as our main ways to communicate.

Once you get into the room, make sure you show chat and, if you have audio/video privileges, set up your microphone, and turn off your video.

If Things Go Terribly Wrong

If we encounter technical issues and are unable to undertake the session in DimDim, we will move the class to our usual Elluminate room. This is our back-up plan. We will post on the DimDim white board and in the chat if this is our decision. If even these don't work, we will post in the Google e-mail list.

What do you think of DimDim?

You may also want to read a 2009 blog post about Sarah's impressions with an earlier version of DimDim. What are your impressions?