January 9, 2003
Video-conferencing gives broad experience at low cost
Planning an international conference in these tough budget times might seem ludicrous. But UWTV’s Christine Ruiz knows better.
Ruiz, who coordinates the UWTV video-conferencing services, says the value of these technology-mediated interactions far outstrips the cost.
In fact, “demand is growing,” she said. “As state budgets are cut, most departments don’t have the wherewithal to travel as much as they once did. Video-conferencing is a perfect solution in that situation because each group can stay at its own site and still connect face to face through the television.”
Most video-conferences occur with groups at one or more sites meeting in a video studio and interacting with one another through video and audio links. When done well, Ruiz says, the technology can provide the means for an important connection without interfering with business as usual.
“We set things up for the client. We make the mics work. We run the cameras for them,” she said. “All they have to do is sit down and conduct their meeting, just as you’d do if you walked into a conference room and had all of your colleagues there with you. Hopefully it’s the same experience. That’s our goal.”
Ruiz and her colleagues can usually meet a client’s video-conferencing needs for between $250 and $500 for a two-hour block of time. That has proved to be a worthwhile investment for at least some UW faculty.
“This technology gives faculty the opportunity to create unique learning
environments for their students,” according to Jack Hoffman, UWTV’s manager of production operations. “It provides the intimacy of face-to-face communication and a level of collaboration that can only be matched by actually having everyone in the same location.”
Johnny Palka is a zoology professor and the co-director of the Program on the Environment. He taught a course on sustainable development during the fall quarter in which UW undergraduates held two meetings via video-conference with faculty and students at the University of Port Elizabeth in South Africa.
Those meetings were a prelude to the spring quarter when some of the students from Palka’s class will travel to South Africa to continue their study of sustainability issues in South Africa and in Washington. The program culminates with another video-conference in May during which students will present their findings after spending a quarter in South Africa. The conferences have proven to be “a fabulous teaching tool,” Palka said.
“Our students were well prepared for the discussion until the South African students asked about our unemployment rate,” Palka recalled. “The students said it’s about 6 or 7 percent in Washington. The South African students came back by saying their unemployment rate is 40 percent in the cities and 80 percent in rural areas. The next thing they asked was, ‘What do you think we should do about it?’ Well it absolutely floored our students.”
That meeting was held early in the morning — or late in the evening for the participants in South Africa. By that afternoon in class, the words of the South African students and their concern about the overwhelming number of unemployed were still fresh in the UW students’ minds.
“The first 20 minutes or so of class was sober reflection about how little we know, how staggering the problems in other parts of the world are, and how unequipped we are to deal with them,” Palka said.
Sandra Chait is the associate director of the Program on Africa, which co-sponsors the UW-South Africa project with the Program on the Environment. She says it has been impressive how the technology has supplemented the cultural learning between the two groups of students.
“Ideally, it would be wonderful if every student could spend a year in another country and learn that culture. But that’s not always possible,” Chait said. “When that’s not possible, however, the face-to-face contact and spontaneous interaction of the video-conferences provide an opportunity for learning that you cannot get from books.”
She recalls a different video-conference interaction between the students in Palka’s class and the South African students. The UW contingent was talking about the state’s effort to balance a need for hydroelectric power with the need to protect salmon habitat.
“The South African students stopped them and asked ‘What’s a salmon?’ And then, once they figured it out and started responding, you realized that for them, they were dealing with saving people,” she said. “There’s such a vast cultural difference there. They didn’t have the luxury of trying to save fish.”
The poignancy of those interactions doesn’t surprise Ruiz. She compares them to attempts to collaborate with different campuses using other forms of technology. And the video-conferences, she says, always come out on top.
“It’s more of a collaborative classroom experience for students on different campuses,” she said. “It goes many steps beyond e-mail between students, or conference calls, because this allows them to interact on that human level — they can see one another, they can learn more about how others approach problems, they can learn a little bit about another culture. You get all of that when you have that face-to-face interaction.”
For more information about setting up a video-conference, contact UWTV by e-mail at videoconferencing@cac.washington.edu or visit their Web site, www.uwtvproduction.org.
