Pages

Thursday, February 06, 2003


Had a great experience chatting with classmate James Mercer and students of his at Arnprior District High School (ADHS) today.

We managed to get video pictures of your faithful scribe -- the request of the gang at ADHS, I promise you -- across the 'net.

To begin we tried to open NetMeeting from within MSN Messenger, but firewall and proxy prevented this.

I then opened a conference on the Sametime server we have at SMART and we met there. Still couldn't get the video across. NeMeeting told me it was sending video and I was watching the feed, but it wasn't being received. "no truth in advertising" I typed in chat at the time.

BridgitTM to the rescue.

Once those in Arnprior, ON opened my e-mail invitation they were able to see the "live feed" from my shared desktop webcam in Calgary, AB. Worked like a charm.

NOTE: It is strongly suggested that chat or voice be part of any synchronous data conferencing you are planning. It's important to be able to communicate along the way when getting participants connected to your conference. "Voice" -- a telephone call -- is usually how this is handled, although we proved today that chat works too.

Here's a link to a SMART Ideas(R) project I started following today's chat. I'm looking forward to submissions from the crew in "the 'prior."1

1. I grew up in Renfrew, ON which is the next Ottawa Valley town "up the line."
The two towns have been known as the "the 'prior" and "the 'frew" since lumberjacks roamed the area.

No comments: