Collaborative Tools Project

A thinking out loud post ... The Scenario At the university we have an amazing room called the 3Sixty . It's a room that can have media projected onto all four walls (and there's some amazing speakers in there too ).  Sara Perry runs a module in there for archaeology students to design a museum exhibition. Last year the students created World War I exhibitions using Powerpoint and YouTube videos. They were very moving. I almost cried at one about a loyal Alsatian. The Problem The problem is this... The students use a very wide ( four walls ) Powerpoint template to create their 3Sixty presentation, but once made, the only place you can really experience this presentation is in the room itself. It would be good if these .ppt files ( or exported movies ) could be projected onto a 3D version of the room. It's a very simple render, I think, but would allow people to see the presentations without being in the room. Having no experience of 3D modelling, I dived in and h...

Last night, Alice Watterson   (Glasgow School of Art)  presented Digital Dwelling at Skara Brae to a packed room K/111, Kings Manor, University of York about her collaboration making digital reconstructions. Here she is (above ) from the "stage" with Sara Perry. Alice was also watched by a roomful of researchers at Southampton University, who tuned in to the Hangout and managed to ask questions in a short Q&A at the end. We're still experimenting with how to get the best from Google+ Hangouts whilst keeping the recording process speaker-responsibility-free and technology-minimalist  in that we don't want the speaker to have to do anything special to be streamed, and we also don't want Sara, who hosts the seminars to have to set up heaps of scary equipment. We may have to compromise though. For example, if the speaker would be willing to send us their slides beforehand and willing, instead of using Powerpoint - to use the Hangout tool...