Mysmartgreen not DimDim
What do you do when you want to hold a small seminar and your speaker is in Adelaide and the participants are spread around Australia? That was the question Patrice Braun and Nigel Rawlins posed. Well there is Illuminate but previous experiences hadn’t been good. We decided to try a few free online solutions which were shortlisted to Dim Dim and WizIQ. They both have similar functionality, but Dim Dim worked flawlessly and the interface looked the best.
Our (IPOL’s) role was just sharing the information. The hard work was left up to Patrice, Nigel and the rest of the Smartgreen team. I received the following invitation:
You are invited to attend a FREE SMARTGREEN WEBINAR on July 29th at 11:00 AM EST. The one hour Webinar will feature the SmartGreen program team (Craig Hurley and Nigel Rawlins from the National Centre for Sustainability (NCS) and Dr Patrice Braun from the Centre for Regional Innovation & Competitiveness (CRIC) and give you an opportunity to ask questions about the SmartGreen program.
We are also fortunate to have Nick Bruse of Strike Consulting as our guest. Nick is the Director of Strike Consulting, a commercialisation and venture development company specialising in the Australian clean technology and environmental sector.
The email also provided registration details and concluded with ‘Once you have registered you will receive an email link where to join us on the day of the event’. So on the 29th July, I clicked on the link and a live seminar was underway. As the photo shows, Patrice was the chairperson, and others also spoke. The virtual space allows for Powerpoint, whiteboard, screen sharing, web, everything you could need. When the guest speaker was talking it was amazing to see, that he was fielding questions (voice) while other related conversations were happening at the same time in the chat window (typically called the ‘back channel’).
What started as an idea, finished up being a great event which received enthusiastic comments from all the participants. If you think Dim Dim could be useful for your teaching or for a webinar, it is as simple as registering on dimdim.com
The Smartgreen program team conducted a great event, and I am looking forward to the next one. The photo is a screen shot of Dim Dim, and you can see Patrice via webcam in the bottom corner.
