[Building Sakai] chat in presence

[Ed Garay]

I see, but Blackboard has had a very easy to use and reliable text chat bulit-in for years (no jokes, please) and yet, I see less and less classes using in it, in recent years.  Instead, our instructors want audio chats, video chats and application sharing, that is, modern media-rich communication, and tools students and teachers alike are very familiar with, like Skype, messenger, GoogleTalk and some such.

At UIC we also have Wimba Voice Tools, which provides several audio tools, including a real-time audio and text-chat that can also saves archives for on-demand playback, ...and we have Wimba Pro (which unlike Voice Tools, is free).  

Pronto is very popular, very useful and provides not only SSO, but also automatic course site aggregation.  Pronto knows what classes students and teachers belong to and it automatically lists you when you are logged in (yes, there is a stealth setting to hide).

I have used Wimba Voice Direct and Pronto in my classes, and even administered short real-time audio quizzes/interviews with my students really like.  Students use Pronto to get together on their own, inside and outside of Blackboard.

We have Wimba Voice and Pronto integrated with Blackboard, but if I remember correctly, Wimba was working with the Sakai community about a year ago trying to integrate their tools with Sakai, so you might already have access to free Pronto at least or be close to getting it.  Shouldn't be too hard since it's essentially jabber with a pretty UI plus LMS hooks.  Check with the Wimba folks.

Greetings from Chicago,  

Ed Garay
Assistant Director for Academic Computing
Director, UIC Instructional Technology Lab
University of Illinois at Chicago
www.accc.uic.edu/Itl
www.twitter.com/garay 

1940 West Taylor Street, Room BGRC 124
Chicago, Illinois 60612

[  Sent from iPad  ]

On May 28, 2010, at 7:34 PM, Nate Angell <nate.angell at rsmart.com> wrote:

> Hi Ed! Glad to see you posting on the Sakai lists ;)
> 
> One issue with linking to an external chat service is it would require
> all the users to have/create accounts on the same common external chat
> service...might work well for institutions on Google or MS email as
> they would have a logical common choice, but for others...
> 
> --
> Nate Angell
> Client Evangelist
> http://www.rsmart.com
> http://twitter.com/xolotl
> http://xolotl.org
> 
> On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Ed Garay <garay at uic.edu> wrote:
>> Why do it, though?
>> 
>> Why not simply link to Skype, GoogleTalk or some other full-featured text/video/audio chat tool?  Or write Sakai connectors for some of these tools, with SSO, primarily.
>> 
>> Just thinking aloud.
>> Hi Chuck.
>> 
>> Ed Garay
>> Assistant Director for Academic Computing
>> Director, UIC Instructional Technology Lab
>> University of Illinois at Chicago
>> www.accc.uic.edu/Itl
>> www.twitter.com/garay
>> 
>> 1940 West Taylor Street, Room BGRC 124
>> Chicago, Illinois 60612
>> 
>> [  Sent from iPad  ]
>> 
>> On May 28, 2010, at 6:45 PM, csev <csev at umich.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> Chuck,
>>> 
>>> I thought about it and when I looked the code over, it felt to me that you could do it all in the presence servlet with a bit of clever Javascript and no persistence.
>>> Nice and surgical just use the presense framework as it exists.
>>> 
>>> I would probably do a tiny pop-up window rather than a popup iframe.  I would not try to make it a full replacement for the chat tool, hoping that if folks really wanted to talk a long time - they would just use the chat tool.
>>> 
>>> Just thinking out loud.
>>> 
>>> /Chuck
>>> 
>>> On May 28, 2010, at 4:25 PM, Charles Hedrick wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I've heard people talk about this, but I'm not sure what has happened. Is anyone working on a text chat to other people in the site, presumably triggered by clicking on their name in the presence list? I have in mind something like the facebook chat. I'd be inclined to use the infrastructure from chat rooms rather than going outside to another chat server, to avoid having to synchronize accounts with another service.
>>>> 
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