Blended Elive Meetings

On Monday, Oct. 22, I attended the Elluminati conference as an online participant. I felt like somewhat of a second class citizen as compared to the on site participants. They got lunch and prizes. They exchanged business cards and networked. On the other hand, during the sessions I could IM with the moderators (there were about 4 of them) and get the speaker's attention quickly if I wanted to. I could also slip out to the bathroom or munch an apple or do email on my other computer if the session didn't capture my interest.

Today I was part of the face-to-face presentation for a blended meeting and we did not server our distant participants very well. A couple things I learned:

1. Start setup at least 45 min in advance: sound checks for the room mikes, launching elive, etc.
2. Ask presenters to show up 15 min. early to get their applications open and docs loaded (and so they can grab some lunch).
3. Have a second elive session going on a computer in the room with moderator status so that someone is actively tending the remote crowd.
4. If you're going to application share, share the whole desktop or a region so that when other applications are open (besides Blackboard), the online folks see the Word file, for instance, rather than a black box.

Chris Sturm's Comments on Audio in Elluminate

One of our grad students complained about the quality of his Elluminate Live connection. He's on a Mac and uses a cable modem to connect to the Internet. The sound varies in quality, and he gets dropped from the sessions. Also, his sound does not work through his headphones. Here are Chris's comments:

There are a couple of things to do right away. First is as Jim mentioned, change the connection speed to reflect a lower speed than the student actually has, such as 56K, if necessary. Cable Modem speeds are not constant and flucuate depending on the neighborhood traffic. If the student has a lot of people in his neighborhood with a cable modem and they are all on late in the afternoon, the cable modem speed will slow. Therefore, adjusting the connection speed is very prudent. The connection speed is what affects the sound of the voice – eLive doesn’t want to drop any of the voice information and so speeds it up.

Second is to test the headset outside of eLive. I presume that the student is using a USB headset. If so and he plugs it in before the session, he may need to check his system preferences before entering the eLive session to see if his Mac has accepted the input device as the USB headset and not the built-in microphone.

Third is to clear the Java Cache. This has been helpful from time-to-time as it clears any eLive modules that may have become corrupted. To do this, the student will have to go into the APPLICATIONS folder, then UTILITIES and then JAVA. In this folder is a JAVA 1.4.2 Plugin settings application. The middle tab is CACHE and from there he’ll need to click on the CLEAR button. This will mean reloading the eLive modules the next time that he enters an eLive session, but with his connection, that shouldn’t be a problem.

For the differeing volume levels, that is related to the levels set by individual students. Version 8 has an auto-leveling feature that equalizes all the voices in the session.

Syncing Entourage and ICal

At UAA we use the Exchange calendar server and I have dutifully put my calendar entries into Entourage even though I don't particularly like it. I see the usefulness of sharing calendars online.

I like ICal better. I like Google calendar better. And I want my calendar entries to show up on my IPhone, which syncs with my home computer.

The 11.3.6 version of Entourage 2004 has a sync feature. One can sync with the Mac address book, ICal, and with Entourage notes. You need MacOS 10.4.3 or later. With a .mac account, you can sync across computers. Wow. Looks like my problem is solved.

To turn on the sync services, in Entourage, go to Entourage>Preferences>General Preferences>Sync Services. Select the items to sync. I'm syncing the calendar and the contacts. Choose to merge the data.

In ICal, a new calendar is created named Entourage. When you update this calendar, Entourage updates and vice versa. If you have data in another ICal, export it and then import it into Entourage Ical calendar. The data will migrate to the Entourage calendar. Cool.

This ICal calendar named Entourage is critical. If you delete it, you lose all the calendar entries in the Entourage calendar. I know. I did it.

So, I set up the Entourage syncing on my work computer and set up the .Mac syncing to happen every hour. I set up the .Mac syncing to happen every hour on my home computer. I just plugged the IPhone into the home computer to sync and voila... all the calendar entries showed up. I've jus edited a calendar entry in the Iphone... when will it show up in Entourage on the other computer?

Ok, so the other thing I learned the hard way is if I sync Entourage on two different Macs and then sync the ICals with .mac I get 2 Ical entries named Entourage. Not fun.