Attend Webinars through the iPhone

I attended a WebEx session early one morning a few weeks ago, and couldn't get my laptop booted up in time. A webinar at 7 am seemed too early even to the computer. No problem, though. I hopped on through my iPhone, with the WebEx Meeting Center app (free, at the App Store).

When you launch the app (a green and blue globe icon labelled "Meet") you can click the Join Now button if you've got an email invitation with a meeting number, or if you have a host account you can sign in and manage a meeting through your iPhone.

Then WebEx called my phone and when I answered, I was in. The presenter was a woman in Amsterdam, another participant was in Stockholm, and I was in Chicago. It was snowing in all three cities, we complained.

I was able to see the webcam feeds of the other participants (up to six webcams can be shown at once on the WebEx screen), but they weren't able to see me. Although the native phone function works while the WebEx app is running, I can't take a snapshot or video at the same time.

So I logged on through my laptop -- which had finally booted up. Here's a screenshot from my iPhone of the three of us on screen as I began a presentation.

It was fairly easy to scroll around to the content being displayed, and when the slides were designed with few words and good-sized images, I could see the presentation quite well on the iPhone.

Is this the next big thing in e-Learning? Will students just tune into the lectures with their iPhones? It's possible...