Borg’s Blog

A webinar is essentially a meeting broadcast over the Internet. They do vary a bit in nature with some being more interactive than others. Another variable is syncronicity with some offers asynchronous viewing. Asynchronous viewing is essentially the same thing as viewing a vodcast.

How do you know whether or not to participate in a webinar. Like all presentations the things to consider are the topic and the speaker(s). What is the credibility of the speaker? How interesting is the topic to you? My hot topics now are cloud computing and Python. If Google were offering a webinar in cloud computing I’d be interesting because the joint effort between Google and Apple constitutes the most powerful cloud avaliable. Likewise I’d be interested in an O’Reilly webinar on Python because they are a leading publisher and advocate of the programming language. I would not be interested in a webinar on a new version of Windows offered by Bill Gates because I’m a Mac guy but you many would be.

So does this technology promise any radical changes in education? I’ve seen it used in the area of computational biology but I wasn’t impressed. Coordination can be cumbersome because of the synchronous nature of the presentation. Large numbers of participants often make it difficult to participate. Questions are problematic when the webinar is finished and all the players have gone home. I think asynchronous modes of transmitting information are more promising.