Tag Archives: Resources

Two New VC Articles

Innovate, an online journal, recently published two new articles on videoconferencing. Just added them to the TWICE Bibliography of articles. One from Scott Merrick, who has published many articles on videoconferencing, and another on college/university classes using VC to bring experts to the classroom. Cool that universities are seeing possibilities for VC other than regular classes.

Winding Down…

So the Keystone Conference is winding down. I’m spending the next session making sure I’m all set for my presentation. It’s been a great conference and I’ve especially enjoyed the networking. Now I’ll be offline for a few days as I take a complete technology break and attend a cousin’s wedding in Canada. I’m looking forwardto it.

Here’s the links I’ll be sharing as “solution resources” for the issues/problems I’ll be addressing in my session. You might find them useful.

Administrative Issues

Curriculum Issues

Teacher Issues

Animation Mentoring

The Orange County Animation Project: Mentoring From The Real World with Michael Guerena, Program Specialist, Orange County Department of Education (CA, UNITED STATES), Dave Master, Director, ACME Animation, and Don Isbell, Animation Teacher, Century High School.

Dave started by explaining the need for students well trained in animation. When professionals review students’ portfolios, they only keep 1 in 1000 of the portfolios that come in.

He showed a video how how students get feedback from professionals on their work.

They have 3 levels of telecasts:

  1. Audition room for students who are just learning the basics. At this level they have a year’s resources for teachers.
  2. The intern level is for students who are really serious. The students work is evaluated by professionals in the industry.
  3. The apprentice level is the same as in the industry. Students have to have 5 pieces of work that are at the level to get a job.

The pros in the studios just walk down the hall to their videoconference room to evaluate the students’ work.

He showed another clip where the students at the intern level are given an assignment. The students work on it for two weeks, revise, review, and then the professionals critique the students work. Then the students do an informed revision on their work. The teachers in the classes around the US also interacted and learned with the pros through the program.

Their group is now considered a major source of talent by the studios!

They do have room for other schools to join (jr high, high school, & college). The telecasts are a round-robin. They make webcasts available for other classes as well.

How do you participate? Contact Debbie Brooks, 323-334-6191, dbrooks at theacmenetwork.org who is the director of this program.

It’s $1000 a year to participate online or $12,500 for all the telecasts which is about half the cost of what it really costs to do the program.

Here’s the project website.

Next we’re hearing from Michael Guerena, and he’s explaining how they are implementing this project on a county wide basis. The project goals include developing opportunities to showcase student animation work through exhibitions, broadcasting, and the Internet, as well as preparing students for a wide range of animation careers.

They partner with local colleges and also work to develop highly-skilled animation instructors.

It’s incredible really how students interact with professionals and get live feedback on their work. One student shared how good it makes him feel to realize that pros care about giving feedback to them and helping them work with their work.

On a side note, you can really tell that these guys are all into video. They have a great background and really good lighting that makes the presentation really easy to listen to & watch.

Now Don Isbell, Animation Teacher, Century High School, is explaining how the program works in his school. His school is in a high poverty and most of his students haven’t been to a museum or traveled much. This program brings an incredible experience for the poorer students and expands their understanding of the types of jobs open to them and gives more of them the realization that they CAN go to college!

Don shared how his students learned collaboration skills, how to behave professionally interacting with the professionals, and how to mentor each other. In addition, the program raised the literacy levels of students as they had to use technical jargon in communicating about animation.

Neat program! My ideas of what can be done with VC have expanded again!

VC Standards

A reference everyone should know about is NYIT EEZ & CILC’s Videoconferencing Standards document. This link is to the document on the Keystone Conference handout page. If you’re involved in VC, you should definitely check out these standards & apply them to your program….

David Thornburg's Keynote

It’s always fun to hear David Thornburg’s keynote presentations.

One of the first technologies he showed was Skype & Festoon, which we had just discussed in the Global Collaboration Birds of a Feather, so that was pretty cool.

A questions to think about: We spend 13 years on reading & writing. How many years do we spend on media literacy?

He’s talking about places you can find images online. Reminds me of a thought I had last year when listening to a session on visual literacy. The cool thing about connecting to an art museum such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, is you get the visual literacy interpretation and instruction along with the pictures. Whereas it takes more work to put together a lesson using online materials, figure out how to connect it to student learning & curriculum benchmarks and make it an interesting lesson all at once.

He showed several other interesting technologies too….

Including MIT’s new hand crank $100 computer…. which will really change one-to-one computing….

We need that same one-to-one access to videoconferencing. Access in classrooms is certainly what we need to aim for because that’s where the action is!

Tuesday Keynote: Millennial Learning Styles

The Keynote presentation today is coming in live from the Harvard School of Education. Chris Dede, is talking about Emerging Digital Media and “NeoMillennial” Learning Styles.

Dede is describing Millenial & Neo Millennial Learning Styles – students using the web to compare multiple sources of information, individually incomplete and collectively inconsistent. Is it mindlessly accumulating or seeking, sieving or synthesizing? He’s wondering about his daughter multitasking… can she really concentrate? He described his daughter and her virtual “think tank” of friends on IM doing their homework.

He’s describing how Cisco is using multitasking for meetings and using PDAs for multitasking and instant messanging.

And here I am in this session multitasking! Showing IM to the person sitting next to me, IMing my office back home, blogging the session, and listening to it all at the same time!

Now Dede is suggesting we use distributed learning instead of distance learning. The term distributed infers how the learning is spread across time, space, and media.

This reminds me of reading The World is Flat this summer and how companies are collaborating across space and time using videoconferencing, instant messaging, and other real-time and asynchronous collaboration tools.

I still want to design some type of international project that uses this same type of multitasking learning environment that Dede is describing. How could we create a learning environment and videoconference project that requires students to collaborate across time & distance to solve or attempt to solve a difficult challenging real world problem?? That is the question I keep mulling over.

Dream Factory VC Idea

In August I read an article in Wired Magazine titled The Dream Factory where the author designed his own guitar, sent the design to a “fab lab” and for about $1000 received his own guitar back in the mail. Very intriguing in the possibilities!

Of course I’m always thinking of the videoconferencing possibilities! Wouldn’t it be neat to somehow find around $500 for two classes to work together to solve a problem with an invention. You could have one of the classes be a class in New Jersey close to the fab lab mentioned in the article so they could go pick it up and avoid shipping costs. A middle school technology/computer class would work, as well as a high school design/manufacturing class. If the two classes met at the same time, they could easily connect to each other. The two classes could decide together on a program and/or design the problem together. Then they could have teams of students design solutions. A panel of student judges from both classes could pick the winning design. After they send it in, the class in NJ could pick it up, get a tour of the “fab lab” and make an iMovie about it to share with the other class. Maybe they could then ship the “invention” to the partner class?

Just some wild ideas that I thought of when reading that article….

Metablog (thinking about blogging): The cool thing about a blog is you have a place to keep your wild and crazy ideas!

Videoconference or Video conference?

I was just exploring Alberta’s VCAlberta.ca website, and ran across a nice collection of Frequently Asked Questions. They are more creative and useful than the usual run of the mill FAQs out there, including the one on my site!

I quote Question #3:

Question: Do I spell it: videoconferencing or video conferencing or video-conferencing?

Answer: All three are commonly used and the use tends to follow what a localized community has decided is the right way. Videoconference as one word is the most common usage in Alberta and in fact the proper spelling. The oxford dictionary, among many other dictionaries, refers to videoconferencing as one word: Oxford Dictionary

Now you know!

The Next MysteryQuest: Science??

Yes, I’m still reading The World is Flat and thinking about implications for my work in videoconferencing. Consider this!

If President Bush is looking for a similar legacy project, there is one just crying out — a national science initiative that would be our generation’s moon shot: a crash program for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in ten years. (p. 283). 

Could the MysteryQuest format be adapted to a big problem like this? It’s certainly engaging and one that affects high school students who are driving! Whenever we do VC interviews with our senators and representatives, our high school students always ask the gas price question. So they certainly care — and caring about the problem is the first step towards being motivated to work on a solution, right?!

What would this look like for a high school class? The World Environment Day project by Global Leap seems like a good start on this issue. But we need more of these videoconferences! We need them more often! We need them to be global – or at least with two countries participating in each one.

On p. 380-381 are several more “big problems” that might be possibilities for high school science VCs. The Grand Challenges in Global Health project addresses big problems such as

creating effective single-dose vaccines that can be used soon after birth, how to prepare vaccines that do not require refrigeration, how to develop needle-free delivery systems for vaccines, … how to create a full range of optimal bioavailable nutrients in a single staple plant species, how to create immunological methods that can cure chronic infections.

Rick Klausner, who runs these programs for the Gates Foundation, explained the goals of the program,

 

…to make a moral appeal to the scientific imagination …We wanted the Grand Challenges to say these are the most exciting, scientific things that anyone in the world could work on right now… and to actually direct some of the foundation’s resources to see if we could do it.

And finally chapter 12 describes how the author’s Dell computer was made. Very fascinating picture of the supply chain and work flow process around the world.

 

The basic design of the motherboard and case … was designed by an original design manufacturer in Taiwan. We put our engineers in their facilities and they come to Austin and we actually codesign these systems. This global teamwork brings an added benefit – a globally distributed virtually twenty-four-hour-per-day development cycle.

Wouldn’t it be fun to have a partner class 12 hours away and do a smaller scale design project like this together?! What a learning experience for all the students involved!

I think I need to talk to our science consultant and some of our high school science teachers….. This won’t be an easily developed format, but will be worth it I think. Do you have any ideas??!! Share a comment!

I’ve finished the book now, so this is the last of the “Flat World and VC” blog entries. In August I’m spending quite a bit of time on the BCISD Field Trip Database, so I’ll be writing about what’s new in the VC content provider arena. It won’t be long before school starts and we start scheduling VCs like crazy!

Flat World Implications for Education

  1. p. 244 Quoting Bill Gates: Our university system is the best … Our university system is competitive and experimental.
    p. 245 Coupled with America’s unique innovation-generating machines – universities, public and private research labs, and retailers – we have the best-regulated and most efficient capital markets in the world….
    Seems clear from this we must encourage students to attend college!
  2. p. 256 Quoting Sean O’Keefe, “Our mission of understanding and protecting our home planet and exploring the universe and searching for life will not be carried out if we don’t have the people to do it.” We must encourage students to study science, engineering, math, and technology. I can make a tiny ripple in this great need by encouraging teachers to participate in videoconferences with NASA and creating and facilitating other engaging, challenging science and math experiences.
  3. p. 258. Students deciding on a career in engineering or science in middle school today won’t complete advanced training for science and engineering occupations until 2018 or 2002. If we need more people in these areas, we need to be inspiring middle school students now to consider math, science and engineering careers. Even more compelling is this quote from p. 275. Because it takes 15 years to create a scientist or advanced engineer, starting from when that young man or woman first gets hooked on science and math in elementary school, we should be embarking on an all-hands-on-deck, no-holds-barred, no-budget-too-large crash program for science and engineering education immediately.
    I know I can only make a tiny ripple. That ripple is probably this: what VC experiences can I provide/encourage that will inspire students?
  4. p. 261. A professor lamented that other than two of his students, they lacked the creativity, problem-solving abilities and passion for learning that would make them worth hiring. How can I make a little dent in students’ creativity, passion for learning and problem-solving skills? I think MysteryQuest makes a tiny dent in this area, but much more needs to be done!
  5. But it’s not just the creativity skills they need! Basic skills are crucial too! p. 264. Those who think that the more rote learning systems of China and Japan can’t turn out innovators who can compete with Americans are sadly mistaken. Quoting Bill Gates, “I have never met the guy who doesn’t know how to multiply who created software. . .”This seems to contradict what Weinberger shared in the opening keynote at NECC, which I missed since I was still flying in. From the NECC Daily Newspaper I gleaned the idea that Weinberger didn’t think kids needed to learn facts like basic math facts and the state capitols because they can look it up on Google. See blog entries by Andy, David and others….

    This seems to contradict what Weinberger shared in the opening keynote at NECC, which I missed since I was still flying in. From the NECC Daily Newspaper I gleaned the idea that Weinberger didn’t think kids needed to learn facts like basic math facts and the state capitols because they can look it up on Google. See blog entries by , and others….I think I’m leaning towards the idea that creativity is built on basic knowledge… which way do you lean?