Tag Archives: VC Community

Communications Research Centre

The last session I’m attending here at the Broadband Summer Institute in Canmore is by John Spence from the Communications Research Centre.

“Relationships are everything.” This technology is about “connecting brains to brains”. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the people you can connect to.

CRC’s role is research the future uses of this technology, forming communities, “connecting brains to brains.” To work with end users at all levels to determine requirements and the R&D agenda.

They do virtual classrooms with long units connecting 3-6 classrooms. Connecting groups across the sites, doing jigsaws across the sites.

It’s interesting that John said specifically that they aren’t a content provider. But they do arrange high level high quality experiences for students each year – international and within Canada.

John was behind the MusicGrid project. There’s a great article online on this project. They keep an online archive of their video music lessons as well. John imagines a digital music portfolio. In this example, teachers defined the research agenda. John works with the researchers and software developers to develop what the teachers need.

Next, John invited a teacher to come up and share about an environmental project. The students connected to experts via phone and videoconferencing. One of the culminating projects was a dramatic presentation of listening to what the beavers are saying about the environment, presented via videoconference.

John showed a video clip of programming from the Canadian Space Agency. High school students mentored middle school students in the videoconference with CSA. Then the students worked in small break out sessions facilitated by the high school sessions and connected back up with CSA to share what they learned. The facilitators “challenge the students to use their collective knowledge to equal the intelligence of the astronauts.”

In another video clip, students from various high schools from around Canada researched and presented what various faiths (Islam, Jewish, etc.) believe about stem cell research. As part of the connection the students were also connected to experts in the field.

Another video clip showed students learning how to play the violin – a small school 500 miles north of Montreal – mostly Inuit students who didn’t speak English or French. As the kids learned, 400 students in the auditorium in Montreal clapped for the students. How powerfully affirming and exciting for the students.

In another clip, the famous Canadian violinist Zukerman teaches a Russian student at the Manhattan School of Music.

Cool stuff. John had more video clips than time. What a treat!

Written Aug. 15. Just couldn’t get it to post online til now.

Royal Tyrrell Museum: Up Close & Palaeo

Still at the Broadband Summer Institute here in Canmore. Now I’m attending a session by Colin Regamey, their new Distance Learning Coordinator. 

The Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta is starting to offer videoconference programming this fall. They have just built a new Atco Tyrrell Learning Centre to support their education outreach programs.

All their programs are correlated to the Alberta Education curriculum. 

Some of their face to face programs include making molds, fossil casting, and digging to find fossils.

They started with pilot programming in 2002-2003. They presented from the ATCO office for this initial programming. Also they’ve piloted some programs this past spring since the new Learning Centre was built. The pilot sessions were the Up Close & Palaeo program. 

The programs include lots of interesting visuals: animations showing the process of fossilization, objects on the document camera, and other visuals.

They work really hard to make the program suit the teachers’ needs. Students submit questions in advance and teachers can request certain topics. 

The first program they are designing is for grade 4, Rockin’ Alberta Resources. The program covers geography, geology, and paleontology. The program will include pre and post materials, lessons, and resources. Included are also fun animated games, similar to those that Mote Marine Laboratory is doing.

New programs they will be adding soon are: 

PIQ: Test Your Palaeo Intelligence, a program to begin or end a classroom study on Palaeontology. The program will be K-12, with specific questions and topics included for each grade level. They are very committed to having their programming tailored to the teachers.

Dinosaurs in the Movies, a program focusing on the evolution of dinosaur science and movies for grades 3 through 12. 

The museum also sells resource books, videos, and other resources to assist teachers in their instruction. Some of the videos are the same ones that are played in the museum. Supplementary material is always good!

The programs are $125 each, and the Up Close and Palaeo program is $200 because it uses an expert from the museum. 

Programs will be available Tuesday to Friday at specific times, and the Up Close and Palaeo program will be available only on Wednesdays at 11:00. (They are on Mountain Time.)

It’s nice to see another content provider getting organized to offer programming for schools!

Global Leap with Mike Griffiths

This morning Mike Griffiths is presenting to the Broadband Summer Institute here in Canmore, Alberta.

MIke started by showing us where he lives using Google Earth. He does this often in his video links to help students understand the geography of the connection. Paul Hieronymous has been doing this too with Google Earth with his I Spy Geography program. It’s a really good model and important to help students gain geographical knowledge along with the content for the program.

Mike talked a lot about the teacher support necessary for successful and effective videoconferences. These are some of the needs he mentioned:

  • Someone to connect to for the first time
  • An automated test site
  • Someone to practice your lesson with
  • Someone to help find partners
  • Someone to help take an idea through to a successful project

Mike had some great stories and examples to share too. Lots of great international videoconference examples, and ideas on how to work around time zone issues etc. My favorite example was of two 1st grade classes, I think it was one in the UK and one in Switzerland. They had Santa Claus come in at one site and show a monkey. And then Santa was leaving to go visit the other school. In a few minutes Santa appeared at the other site with the same monkey. (Well actually they’d mailed it ahead of time.) The Santa in Switzerland looked a bit different and the kids commented on it. But the teacher explained how Santa must appear in the costume of each culture. What a fun experience that would be!

And finally…. Mike emphasized that “VC is not the purpose, but the means to achieve our outcomes.” It’s nice to try out a few, but to really make an impact, how does VC support your outcomes/curriculum.

“Bringing the world into the classroom changes the world.”  Videoconferencing gives us an “opportunity to change the world.” When kids talk to kids in other locations, they begin to understand and appreciate other cultures & points of view.

Thanks Mike for another great presentation!

 

VC in Alberta

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at Alberta’s Broadband Summer Institute this summer. So after the first half day, here’s a report on videoconferencing in Alberta!

BBSI & VC in Alberta
The Broadband Summer Institute has been running for at least 5 years. In the past it has included Ontario teachers, but is now just for Alberta teachers. It’s a three day long conference on videoconferencing. This year 170 teachers are here to learn and share best practices in videoconferencing. The conference is partially funded by Alberta Education. You can visit the VCAlberta website to learn more about the amazing things happening in this province. By tomorrow, all the presentations from the today will be up online so you can watch them via web streaming, thanks to the University of Lethbridge. The whole conference will be archived online! What a treasure of resources that will be!

In the packet was included a thick booklet, Videoconferencing Research Community of Practice. This research is definitely a huge contribution to the videoconferencing community, and you should look at it if you haven’t already! Also see the other research publications they’ve posted online.

I’m really impressed with the level of support for VC at the provincial level. It reminds me of some of the states that have a statewide network. Not only do they have an MCU & VC support specialist, they also have a person focusing on research, another on PD, and they’ve just created a new position for VC projects. In addition, they’ve just recently given each jurisdiction $60,000 to put at least two units in their schools. So each jurisdiction in Alberta has at least 2 endpoints. Think of all the classes we could connect with!!

Some New VC Phrases
I picked up two fun new phrases from Dr. Bette Gray, Director, Stakeholder Technology Branch, Alberta Education.

“Experiencing packet loss”. Last night at dinner with the planning committee I couldn’t remember the name of a place I had done a videoconference with. Bette said that I was experiencing packet loss. Has that ever happened to you? Maybe time to reset the connection?! :>

“Windshield time.” You know this already, but maybe haven’t said it quite this way! Did you know that videoconferencing allows you to reduce windshield time when trying to attend meetings & PD? I wonder if windshield time means more in the winter when you are trying to keep the snow off your car so you can see where you’re going!

New Content Provider
Royal Tyrrell Museum is starting to offer videoconferencing programming this fall, with a program called “Up Close and Paleo.” I’m going to that breakout session tomorrow and will be able to report more. Always nice to learn about a new content provider!

August 2008 International Videoconference Conference
Alberta is hosting an international conference on videoconferencing in 2008. No official name yet, and I don’t know the dates yet, but will post them here when I find out. We’ll all want to mark our calendars for sure! In Banff, no less!! Can’t miss that!!

Alberta at the Smithsonian
We learned today about how Alberta was featured at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. As part of their booth, they videoconferenced back to Alberta for 10 sessions with Alberta kids. Very cool. Check out pictures and video clips on the Alberta at the Smithsonian blog.

Project Development
My session went very well too. Teachers here know enough about videoconferencing to get really excited when presented with some basic project templates. I gave them time to “pair-share” their ideas for projects and they had so many ideas it was hard to go to the next thing! That’s the excitement I love! The conference has a “project partners wall” where people are posting their ideas to find partners among conference attendees. Cool idea!

U2 Can VC
Finally, as a speaker thank you gift, I received a t-shirt that says “U2 Can VC”, which was even funnier because everyone was joking about VCing with U2 all afternoon.

These Albertans have it together! It was a very engaging interesting afternoon. Looking forward to more learning tomorrow!

123 VC: Jazzing Up… Summary

Finally, if you’ve been reading my blog and wanting a better description of the workshop 123 VC: Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with Videoconferencing, please visit Andrea Israeli’s blog. Her write-up/summary/reflection from the week is right on. Thanks Andrea!

Student Reflections on a VC

Here’s another great tidbit from the workshop last week, 123 VC: Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with Videoconferencing.

This is from one of the group’s project presentation. As part of their project, they included how they would have students evaluate the videoconference and debrief afterwards. Here are the questions they’d ask their students:

  • What did you learn from the VC?
  • What did you learn from the VC that you couldn’t have done otherwise?
  • What did you like about the VC?

Three simple questions! Think how much you’d learn from their answers!

When Things Go Wrong

In the 123 VC: Jazzing Up Your Curriculum with Videoconferencing workshop last week, my participants asked me to tell my stories of all the things that can go wrong with a videoconference.

I shared several stories, most of which I’ve written about before in Top Ten Reasons a VC Gets Cancelled.

Then we talked about what to do about it.

  • Have a backup plan. It’s always a good idea with any technology lesson plan to have a backup plan in case the technology (or electricity) fails! Have another lesson plan or simple activity students can do while they are waiting. Make a list of everything you know about where you are connecting. Brainstorm questions for the place you’re connecting to. Content activities. Puzzles. Etc.
  • Dressing up. If you’ve been partnered with me for Read Across America, you may have seen me in my Cat in the Hat outfit. I dress up every year so just in case the connection doesn’t work, the students have something interesting to see and they can share their presentation with me. Sure helps with some of the frustration.
  • Rescheduling. Sometimes rescheduling is all you can do. That in itself can be challenging. But this is a good reason to have the equipment in the building. Makes it easier to go back to class and continue on if things don’t work!

As we ended the discussion in the workshop, one of the participants reminded everyone of one of the optional articles for reading. It includes a checklist for videoconferencing that deals with this issue.

Turrell, G. “Good Practice in the Use of Video Conferencing.” ATHENA. May 7, 2004.

Do you have any creative ideas for what to do when things go wrong? Share them in comments!

HyperMirror Pictures

Thank you to Akio Yamanaka for taking pictures at the HyperMirror session at NECC and sending them to me. After the session, they opened the floor for attendees to come on camera and see what it is like. I wanted to try out the hand-clapping pattern for See See My Playmate.


First we demonstrated the pattern, as they girls in Japan hadn’t seen it before.

Here we are trying to line up our hands to “clap.”


Trying to get the timing right!

Almost have it! We only had a couple minutes. I think if we had more time to practice we could have done it.

Here is what it looked like from this end. I am facing the projector screen where I was seeing the same view as the pictures above.

See the big smiles on everyone’s faces. Clearly this technology helps us feel closer together!

Very cool. Thank you Akio for these pictures! I look forward to hearing about future projects with HyperMirror videoconferencing.

Conference Tags: necc necc06

E.164 Dialing

For the last 6 months I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how e.164 dialing could/should/is working connecting outside of our own networks.

Here are some of the things I’ve discovered.

  • E.164 dialing is a specific kind of H323 dialing your endpoint could do, usually in conjunction with a gatekeeper.
  • There is an educational Global Dialing Scheme in the works. You can read about it on the Internet2 website.
  • Megaconference and Megaconference Jr. use the E.164 Global Dialing Scheme dialing. This requires registering to a gatekeeper that participates in the Global Dialing Scheme (GDS). Gatekeepers can be neighbored together to join this scheme and there is a specific procedure for participating in this. Megaconference Jr. did have to allow some sites to dial the IP address instead of the GDS e.164 number because some units could not connect. It would be interesting to know more about that.
  • The United Kindgom has a service called JVCS that is using the GDS. Yesterday I did a test call with a location in the UK. They gave me their long e.164 number. It looked like the long ones used for the Megaconference dialing, so I registered with the Internet2 Commons gatekeeper to see if it would work. They were able to call my e.164 number on the Internet2 Commons gatekeeper, but I couldn’t call them the same way. We are still investigating why. They were also able to use the JVCS MCU to call me via IP address. (I’ve done a few connections now with JVCS’s MCU and the calls work great.)

Questions I Still Have

  • How do organizations get their gatekeepers registered and organized to participate in GDS? Who organizes that? Is it different for each country? What does it cost to participate? Some of the answers are here, but not enough for me to know how my 70 endpoints could participate.
  • If the vendors are pushing us towards gatekeeper registration as “best practice”, then in K12 we have to get something working so we can keep dialing each other. Is that even possible/feasible?
  • On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about this review of my projects session at NECC.

“Towards the end of the session the presenters had participants talk about implementation ideas in our respective school districts. The two people I spoke with agreed that there are a number of challenges to successful video conferences including cost, the technology and developing the programs. One person from a university said that she had never been part of a video conference yet that didn’t need a technician present to make sure it all worked, that it took time before the video conference to make sure all equipment was working prior to the event, and that often, there were interruptions in the connections. In our small group conversation, we wondered what place video conferencing may continue to play in education with the advent of lower costs communication solutions such as podcasts and web based interactive software such as Elluminate or Tegrity. Only time will tell.”

While I don’t agree totally with the tech support issues raised (I have several media specialists who are now able to do calls on their own with minimal problems), it certainly is a valid point. I’ve already blogged about how teachers can’t be expected to do this on their own.

If the technology is getting more complicated (all this weird dialing) instead of easier to use (I’m thinking specifically of K12 schools with limited tech support who want to connect to any other K12 school out there), what then???

I’m still mulling this over. Please comment if you have any thoughts on this!

In the meantime though, I’m going to keep doing creative curriculum based VCs for my schools!! I still do believe in the power of whole group based quality audio videoconferencing for communication & curriculum reasons!

NECC Exhibitor Visit #2

Today I talked to Polycom, Tandberg, and directPacket Research about their firewall traversal units. My main question is, how does it accept incoming calls?

Tandberg and directPacket Research require the “rogue” or “unknown” endpoint on the public side to register with the embedded gatekeeper to allow calls.

Polycom allows incoming calls with extension dialing, however it’s a bit of a trick to make a Tandberg endpoint dial in. I’m waiting for an email with a solution for that. I talked to someone who knows how it can be done and will send me the trick.

Why should I want incoming calls from public IPs?
Read Around the World 2007. How can I match a ton of sites if almost all of them can only dial out?????

“Best Practice”
Here’s the interesting thing. The rationale behind requiring sites to register to the gatekeeper is (in Tandberg’s point of view) best practice videoconferencing. I’m thinking maybe it’s really about security. Is it really secure to punch holes in your firewall for videoconferencing? I’m not a security expert for sure, but there’s a whole bunch of us doing VC this way (with VC holes in our firewalls) and I haven’t heard yet of someone hijacking an endpoint to hack the network.

Here’s my question really. If the industry thinks (or at least some in the industry think) that best practice is not allowing “rogue” or “unknown” units to dial in…. then…. how do we call each other? That term cracks me up! If you want to do a project with me, you’re a rogue endpoint! How does that make you feel?!!! LOL.

The answer is supposed to be gatekeepers. I still chuckle at that. Or at least I try to chuckle at it so I won’t cry! LOL. I did 400 VCs last year with almost 400 different places. Am I going to register with them all? Are we all going to neighbor our gatekeepers together? There’s so many ad hoc installations out there with very little technical support that I really think it’s a pipedream. Wainhouse Research just did a survey of VC in the U.S. and it was announced in the SIG IVC session this evening. The paper is on the Tandberg site right now because they sponsored it, but it will be on the Wainhouse site as well next week. Bottom line. There are 23,000 VC rooms in the US. Now, tell me, how are we going to connect to each other if we have to use gatekeepers?? Can we really get organized enough to neighbor 23,000 endpoints and their respective gatekeepers together? I have me doubts.

Then there was the conversation with vendors about gatekeepers getting in the way of calls. It makes me laugh to see the puzzled looks. I got this at the H323 workshop I went to in May too. Gatekeepers aren’t supposed to get in the way of calls. Unregistering from the GK isn’t supposed to be a solution to make the call work. But just about everyone I know who does lots of VCs  with “rogue units” (i.e. other schools) has run into this little quirk. One of these days several of us need to open trouble tickets so the gurus can trace the packets to see what’s really happening.

What we really need is an option on the front screen to unregister from gatekeepers, or to have a list of “favorite gatekeepers” so the end user can jump between the places (read: school districts around the world) that they like to connect to. I know this isn’t a corporate VC need for sure, but it’s driving some of us in K12 crazy.

I also learned that there is a new standard for firewall traversal called H.460 version 18 & 19. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this in the future. I didn’t get very far in googling it.

Well, I’ll keep learning and investigating this and sharing what I’ve learned. If you know more, or have comments (even vendors!), please comment.

Conference Tags: necc necc06