Citation
Dorwick, K. (2000), "From Where We Work: A CREN/EDUCAUSE Live Event", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2000.23917aac.013
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2000, MCB UP Limited
From Where We Work: A CREN/EDUCAUSE Live Event
Keith Dorwick
As participant Howard Strauss noted during this live panel discussion from EDUCAUSE '99,
"One important thing we get from going to conferences such as this ... is a chance to reflect on where we are, where we should be going and how best to get there" (Bucher et al., 1999).
However, if this reflective component is such an important part of ongoing participation in the academic community, then more of us need to have access to that ongoing series of conversations, and a growing number of conferences are presenting online components and tracks available to those unable to travel far distances.
"Highlights from EDUCAUSE '99," a partnership between EDUCAUSE[1] and CREN (Corporation for Research and Educational Networking) [2], was offered over the Internet from Long Beach and included an interactive component in which offsite listeners (using RealPlayer) were invited to send questions to a moderator via e-mail in real time. This surprisingly effective protocol allowed synchronous participation from offsite listeners while requiring a relatively low-tech requirement at the onsite location. Part of CREN's ongoing Tech Talk series[3], "Highlights from EDUCAUSE" included John Bucher, Director of Information Technology at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio; Barbara J. O'Keefe, Professor in the School of Information and Director of the Media Union at the University of Michigan; and Howard Strauss, CREN's Technology Anchor and Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University. Judith Boettcher, CREN's Executive Director, served as moderator and host.
Of course, one of the major areas of interest was, quite simply, new directions in technology for example Bucher mentioned a battery-powered device from Hitachi called the M2 Media Recorder, which included a tiny 1.1 GB hard drive in its housing and which could store no fewer than 12,000 JPEG images. As Bucher noted, this kind of device could store "all the pictures you're ever going to take in your life ... or 16 hours of audio ... or even two hours of MPEG 1 video." Such a device could allow, for instance, professors to record digital images on their way to work, images that would be available immediately upon arriving in their classrooms. The M2 Media Recorder might also help librarians to provide electronic reserves, since electronic materials need both the infrastructure to provide such reserves, but also the means to license already existing material and convert it to multimedia. A professor studying, for example, the speech patterns of high school seniors could go out to her research site, record the data for her research, and present those data for discussion on the World Wide Web, all in a single day, without any costs beyond those already incurred by academic computer centers, and no fees for copyright permissions.
The panelists also discussed other infrastructure issues. Institutions must pay the salaries and benefits for information professionals and retain those professionals in a hot tech market, yet demand for the services provided by those professionals is growing. In this context, O'Keefe discussed the work of her colleague, Charles Severance, Associate Director of the Media Union at Michigan, who has developed a tool called "Clipboard 2000," which automates much of the process of transferring their lectures to the Web: faculty members start the software, and create a new PowerPoint presentation, using it as a whiteboard. As they do, a digital camera records both audio and video, and the whole lecture is ported to the Web without having to worry about its component files.
Of course, this approach only preserves the format of the spoken lecture in cyberspace since we know that lecturing is not an effective means of causing good long-term retention in student learning, such software begs the question of whether educators ought to attempt to transfer lecturing at all. Instead, perhaps we ought to focus on ways to transmit the discussion, and its concomitant student-student and student-teacher rich interactions, to electronic environments, but Clipboard 2000 does provide an excellent means of archiving classroom-based lectures via multimedia.
Since multimedia and connectivity require a high level of technology, the panel discussed included the access difficulties created by infusions of new technologies and the problems caused by the need to maintain old technologies for users who do not have the time or the inclination to stop using tools that served and serve their purposes more than adequately.
Finally, another word about the CREN Tech Talks, and the Highlights event from EDUCAUSE: while the discussion occurred on October 28, 1999, the event is fully archived as are all Tech Talks the Web site for this ongoing series not only leads users to future panel discussion, it also maintains both an audio and text transcript for each event, along with related online materials: http://www.cren.net/know/techtalk/events/EDUCAUSE99.html includes, for example, links to other abstracts from EDUCAUSE '99 presentations, the Web resources associated with a PBS telecast that included clips of the Digital Media Union run by Barbara O'Keefe, and many other materials that allow listeners and readers to use this as a professional and scholarly source: the CREN Tech Talks, including the Highlights from EDUCAUSE '99, are a valuable resource for the readers of this journal.
Notes
3. http://www.cren.net/know/techtalk/index.html
Reference
Bucher, J. et al. (1999), "Hot IT Topics: Live from EDUCAUSE". Text Transcript. http://www.cren.net/know/techtalk/trans/EDUCAUSE_1.html October 28. Last Visited: December 3, 1999.
Keith Dorwick is Instructional Media Planner, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL. kdorwick@uic.edu