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This summer, Wake Forest began a six month pilot for Cisco’s WebEx. WebEx is a video-based collaboration software package. It allows users to chat with text and video, host real-time meetings that can include sharing your desktop so others can see what you’re doing, writing on a whiteboard, and sharing files, and integrates with Outlook to pull in email and calendaring information.

So far, I’ve been experimenting with it to see what scenarios are improved by WebEx, and which are made more complicated. So far, video chat has been a big winner! ThinkPads now come with cameras making video chat super easy. As you can see above, video enables sharing visual information that just doesn’t come through over the phone or in email. Though… you can also see the look of confusion on someone’s face as they’re hunting for the “print screen” button! 🙂

We’ll be doing a little more experimentation, to see what strengths and limitations we find. If you’re interested in trying out an online meeting space, let me know. We’ll give it a try! And if you’re really interested, Giz might even show you his socks!

Gretchen Edwards, our new Cisco Fellow will be learning a lot about what Cisco offers and will be spending time working on how technology can improve higher education. Look for an introductory post from her soon!