Webconference & web-presence

In a meeting with Erik Duval last week, he introduced me and my colleagues to two interesting tools that are being developed at the Centre for New Media at the Open University in the UK. These tools are being developed in support of e-learning activiteis. Both tools are developed in Flash, and are therefore platform-independent. All you need is a recent browser, Flash-player 7 (or higher), and a webcam, microphone and speakers/headphones.

• Hexagon is a web-presence tool that allows a number of (international) users to be in virtual rooms and see who else is present.
  
• Flashmeeting is a full-fletched web-meeting tool, that combines audio/video-conferencing, with text-chat, URL-sharing and voting options. One can also choose to have the web-meeting recorded, and then have it stored on a server for later playback.

Neat stuff.