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A Forum for Supporting Interactive Presentations
to Distributed Audiences
Ellen A. Isaacs,
Trevor Morris, and
Thomas K. Rodriguez,
SunSoft, Inc., 2550 Garcia Ave., Mountain View, CA 94043 USA
ellen.isaacs@sun.com;
trevor.morris@sun.com;
tom.rodriguez@eng.sun.com
Reference: Isaacs, E.A., Morris, T. & Rodriguez, T.K. (1994). A Forum for Supporting Interactive Presentations to Distribute Audiences, Proceedings of the
Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
Chapel Hill, NC: ACM Press, 405-416.
(c) 1994 Association for Computing Machinery
Note: This is a digitized copy derived from an ACM copyrighted
work. ACM did not prepare this copy and does not guarantee that it is
an accurate copy of the author's original work.
- A PostScript version of this paper is available.
Abstract
Computer technology is available to build video-based tools for supporting
presentations to distributed audiences, but it is unclear how such an
environment affects participants' ability to interact and to learn. We built
and tested a tool called Forum that broadcasts live audio, video and slides
from a speaker, and enables audiences to interact with the speaker and other
audience members in a variety of ways. The challenge was to enable effective
interactions while overcoming obstacles introduced by the distributed nature of
the environment, the large size of the group, and the asymmetric roles of the
participants. Forum was most successful in enabling effective presentations in
cases when the topic sparked a great deal of audience participation or when the
purpose of the talk was mostly informational and did not require a great deal
of interaction. We are exploring ways to enhance Forum to expand the
effectiveness of this technology.
Keywords: Broadcast video, distributed presentations, distance learning, remote collaboration, user interface design, multimedia.
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