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June 1, 2003
When Good Technology Goes Bad
By Scott Merrick
USN LS Tech Coordinator Scott Merrick, Spanish Teacher Rosa Commins, and 4th graders talk about how things don't always work out!
Videoconferencing — just like with other technologies employed in the service of education — does not always go well. What do you do when it doesn't?
First of all, it is of the utmost importance that any teacher or technology coordinator has a "Plan B" in his or her hip pocket when entering into an interaction. So many things can go wrong, and you know what "Murphy" saidż
I've not seen it all, but I can say I've seen my share of "snafus." Some of them have led to valuable "teachable moments." In fact, there are Web chronicles dedicated to outlining everything that can go wrong with a videoconference. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Instructional Technology, in order to help prepare their teachers and technologists for effective videoconferencing, has put together a marvelous little movie called "A Videoconference Where Everything Goes Wrong," available at their "Guide to Effective H.323 Videoconferencing." The "DoIT" site at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a 10-minute alternative version of this experience evocatively entitled "The Videoconferencing Zone." Chances are you'll discover many helpful examples at these sites, examples to share with your teachers, students, or technology folks to help all of them prepare for videoconference effectiveness.
Whatever your reaction to these movies you'll want to avoid their pitfalls in your own interactions. One thing that will help is to have the trust and the respect of talented fellow educators at your school. I am lucky enough to have that at my own school, University School of Nashville, in Nashville, Tennessee. Let me detail one recent experience that might help illustrate some ways to make the best of this sort of bad situation. I will make an effort to protect the identity of the company that provided the program: One hopes that they learned as much as I did from the experience and that they will avoid similar performance in future presentations. The regrettable outcome of the failed interaction, however, cannot be overemphasized: It will undoubtedly be more difficult for me to enlist these teachers and their classrooms in videoconferencing the next time that a promising offering becomes available.
My third grade classes all embark upon a Winter Holiday's mini-unit toward the Winter break. When I learned that there was a planned videoconferencing interaction with a site in a Spanish speaking country available as part of a relatively new U.S.-based content provider's program offerings, I leapt at the opportunity. I visited the provider's Website (found, by the way, through a posting on Pacific Bell's ED1VIDCONF listserv, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in educational applications for videoconferencing). I fired an email off to our Spanish language teacher and the four grade-level teachers, outlining the program to them and asking our administration to underwrite the program fees. Sadly, by the time I received permission to register, the interactive spots were filled. There were, however, several "view only" opportunities at around half price. I signed us on.
A nice, if somewhat typographically unsound, set of classroom resources arrived as an Email attachment about a week before the event. These I printed and shared with the teachers. I made an effort to reserve our multi-purpose room for the scheduled time, but it was already reserved. Drop back to first Plan B: resort to the 120 foot cabling rig that I have used for large group interactions in the past. Doing so required that I climb a ladder and retrieve the coiled cat5 cable from its repository in the drop ceiling above our open atrium. Okay.
A week before the event I had followed the clear directions in the materials by calling the loopback number at their commercial bridging service. This worked merrily, so I figured I was set. On the "morning of," I arrived early and wheeled my Polycom cart with its 36-inch hi-resolution television set down to the atrium, dropped the cable, and booted up the unit: No ISDN connection. Several runs up and down the steps to the server room and to my computer lab yielded no success; and in a last ditch effort at troubleshooting I decided that I should try using a female/female RJ-45 inline coupler connector, which of course was a tiny piece of hardware available nowhere in the building. I ran out to my car and drove the 3.5 miles to Radio Shack and back in approximately 12 minutes. I was lucky to get back to school without a fine for speeding, but I did return to school in time to try the solution, which proved to be no solution. My videoconferencing unit displayed the same dead red down arrow icon at boot-up. Somewhat frantically, I wheeled the cart back up to my lab and hooked up the Polycom, which booted nicely and connected to the ISDN line just the way it should. We would just have to squeeze all 72 children into my 20 x 30 foot lab room, along with the 21 resident computer desks and chairs.
All four teachers and their students dutifully arrived in the lab the prescribed 10 minutes prior to our scheduled event. Meanwhile I had successfully connected at our maximum ISDN speed of 128Kb. There was already something else wrong, though: the facilitator at the provider site was seen and heard repeatedly entreating the 14 participating schools to mute their microphones. To the providers' credit, instructions for "View Only" sites to mute microphones were prominently featured in the advance literature. Nonetheless, a royally-nasty white noise surrounded everything the facilitator spoke into the site's radio microphone, even as her technicians were bravely attempting to locate its source and eliminate the noise. Seated on the carpet in my computer lab, our students were being treated to video images of the occasional receding-hairline over deeply furrowed brow as the conference view switched from quietly seated classroom, to technician, to the remote site in the Hispanic speaking country. Over the following 20 minutes the view changed but the sound did not clear up. Only once did the audio quality briefly normalize, and at that point I hastily typed out a large-font statement describing the circumstances, hoping that the techs would find the information useful. I trained our camera on the page, which read something like: "We are hearing a very bad hissing noise, which disappeared momentarily and restarted when the man at your presenting site spoke again into the microphone." I still believe that the source of the audio interference was that microphone, but either that was not the case or we were ignored. We decided to move to the real Plan B.
Our Spanish teacher had prepared chart paper with the Spanish song lyrics what were to be sung during the interaction, and she went over these with the children. Then she read aloud a detailed picture book, The piżata maker, El piżatero , by George Ancona, about how a craftsman makes a Pinata. Our children were sweltering and getting restless, but they attended well and learned something during the stressful half hour while the videoconference event "went South" in more ways than one. It was clear that the students at the other sites were under rather sterner control. They sat mostly motionless and stared at their own display devices. Toward the end of our experience, I asked our students to stand up and jump up and down. This relieved the tension somewhat, though it must have looked rather odd to the other sites who might have been watching.
Finally, a half hour late, I could see that the Hispanic site was preparing to present. I asked our teacher if I could interrupt, turned up the volume, and was appalled to hear that they were proceeding without remedying the audio problems. With very careful listening, we could just barely make out an acceptable percentage of what the child was saying. Now, though, there was an additional problem. Whenever a student would speak, we were treated to a lovely view of a wall clock. Clearly, the facilitators at the presenting site did not know that their camera was not trained on their presenter. Midway through the second child's presentation, I disconnected the Polycom connection. Our experience was over. A few minutes later, after the students had returned to their classrooms, I Emailed the provider, careful to add to my comments the line, "żof course I will not be expecting an invoice for this experience." A few hours later I had a response verifying that the event would be "comped" (a restaurant/retail term for "complimentarily" providing products or services to a disgruntled patron or a VIP). Additionally, along with apologies, we were offered a videotape of the presentation at the bargain price of $25.00. I didn't ask whether that included shipping and handling, but neither did I request the tape.
I am proud of our teachers and our students for their patience and understanding of this event's failures; but I am also painfully aware that there will be additional fallout in the future. My teachers highly covetżand rightly so--their classroom instructional time; and though I can count on them to come through for innovative new experiments, I know that it will be more difficult to win these four teachers over next time an opportunity comes our way. Despite the smiles and the banter like "Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you", precious instructional time was sacrificed for an attractively packaged experience that turned into an (admittedly valid) Plan B. More careful scheduling and more thorough back-up planning may help the next attempt be more successful, but that remains to be seen. New obstacles to adoption of new technology have been put into play, and new ways to overcome them will need to be devised.
University School of Nashville is a member of Project DIANE, one of the nation's oldest distance education networks still in continuous operation. The program provider described in the foregoing article is not affiliated with Project DIANE.
Email: Scott Merrick
Links:
University School of Nashville
Vanderbilt University Office of Science Outreach
Project DIANE
PacBell's Videoconferencing Collaboration Collage, ED1VIDCONF listserv
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