What is it?

(click screenshot to view full size)

Disseminate is an online platform for conducting video-based seminar discussions. It does not attempt to replace existing software used in online courses but instead seeks to expand both them and classroom education by providing an environnment for multi-modal, real-time communication outside of the classroom. Disseminate was created with ease of use in mind at all times and is optimized to reduce the bandwidth needed for online video communication.

Disseminate is currently being tested in cooperation with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. The screenshot to the left is from a test seminar conducted in a course titled "The History of Communication" taught at Columbia by Prof. Frank Moretti. The seminar topic was the essay "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Frederic Jameson.

How does it work?

One person is selected to speak at a time. Each seminar has a moderator who controls who the currently selected speaker is. Every partcipant can press a button to "raise their hand" and indicate to the moderator that they wish to speak. Participants who are not currently selected can still communicate using the text chat.

Disseminate emphasizes visual community by displaying snapshots of each partcipant. These snapshots are taken when users log in to each seminar, as opposed to participants having static "glamour shots" that are reused over and over. Thus, in each seminar we see the appearance of the participants at the actual time of the seminar and avoid disembodied text messages where there is no sense of visual identity. Each snapshot can also be clicked on to gain further background information about the participants, enhancing the sense of community.

How was it created?

Disseminate was written using Macromedia Flash and the Flash Communication Server (FCS). Although Flash has been a mainstay of the web for many years, it is only recently that Macromedia added the FCS to provide a system for handling real-time communication needs. The advantage of using Flash is that its installed user base is well over 90% of the Web population, and it runs on both Windows and Mac OS machines. This means that almost anybody can immediately log on and begin using the software without complicated installations regardless of the platform they use.

What do I need to run it?

You need a computer made in the last four years, a web cam, a microphone and preferably a broadband internet connection. Even a very slow DSL or cable connection is fast enough to run Disseminate at full quality as it is run using approximately 25 KB of bandwidth. The average DSL connection has 100 KB available to it.