Virtual Meetings

About eleven days ago I initiated a discussion about virtual meeting technology in the IBM i Professionals group on Linkedin. Members can see the following link, if interested:

http://linkd.in/yIbjxH


I initially expressed concerns over the seemingly high resource requirements of streaming audio and video content over a network in order to support virtual meetings, which is fairly expensive. I also began researching possible Web browser based alternatives.

The context that I'm most interested in would be hosting virtual classrooms for school students, and more particularly interested in things that would integrate well with our student information system for K-12 schools.

For example, consider the possibility of a math teacher scratching equations and notes onto some sort of electronic scratch pad that would simultaneously "appear" on a browser-based white board, shared by all participants in the class. Consider doing that without streaming video.

In addition to white boards, I envision teachers and students interacting through slide presentations, chat windows, surveys, tests, links to static content. In most cases, teachers would need to be in control of what appears on student's screens, and what interactive capabilities were allowed during the course of the meeting. I still see a need for streaming audio and video content, but how can it be done most efficiently, and support more users?

At the peak of the Android Development discussion on this list, someone suggested getting a group together for more interactive discussion. I'm interested in discussing the types of technologies that would make that type of interaction available to a broad range of participants.

-Nathan.