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Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century - ISSN: 1064-4326   December,1997 - Volume 5, Number 3-4, pp. 15-27

This article is archived as GUICE IPCTV5N4 on LISTSERV@LISTSERV.GEORGETOWN.EDU

RETHINKING THE WIRED CLASSROOM: AN INTERNATIONAL VIDEO-CONFERENCING EXPERIMENT

Jon Guice

ABSTRACT

This article describes and evaluates a seminar course taught jointly between Stanford University and Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology using video- conferencing over the Internet. Lectures, questions and open discussion were mixed in a lively format. At the level of network infrastructure, the experiment demonstrated an important advance in the state of the art. However, at other levels, including educational design, the experiment revealed problems with the technology-driven approach taken by course staff. Although it is widely recognized that it is necessary to address social issues in the introduction of new technologies, this case suggests one way to do this that has not been widely explored: using social arrangements to address technical shortcomings. By way of illustration, the article concludes with suggestions of ways to use video-conferencing that do not depend on technical perfection.

INTRODUCTION

Video communications are beginning to enable meetings over any distance. In television newscasts, high-resolution video-conferencing is used to bring distant speakers face to face with the anchor and other studio speakers. In business, less expensive, lower bandwidth methods have evolved rapidly, linking boardrooms, offices and research labs around the world. But in higher education, approaches are only beginning to be developed and tested.

A new program called Sweden-Silicon Valley Link aims to establish a high-speed telecommunications infrastructure linking universities, experiment with and develop a "virtual classroom" platform for use of the network infrastructure, and foster joint curricula and communication among universities. (Sweden-Silicon Valley Link, 1996) As a first step, in the spring of 1996, Stanford University and Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology (KTH (Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan)) connected two large classrooms with two-way video, audio and a shared electronic whiteboard.

In its immediate goal of establishing a new intercontinental infrastructure for linking campuses, the experiment was a success. However, toward the longer-term goal of developing a re-usable platform for distance learning, the experiment had mixed results. The technologies chosen to link rooms--the video, audio and whiteboard equipment--had problems of fidelity and usability, and sometimes broke down. But there were also social and educational issues, less apparent to participants, which also contributed to the perceived difficulties.

In fact, the results reflected the largely technology-driven process through which the seminar was designed and carried out. As is becoming widely understood in research and design communities, such an orientation is not likely to produce long-term benefits to higher education. Without including educational and social considerations, future experiments run the risk of success on limited technical grounds.

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The experiment also suggests a way to include social and educational aspects that has not been widely recognized: using social means to overcome technical problems. Let me explain what I mean by this.

Most discussions of information technology in education typically are addressed to making improvements at one or another 'level', and suggest a divided process for development. In the case of video-conferencing, for instance, one might recognize several hierarchically dependent problem areas: networking (physical and logical); applications (the software that runs on the network); user interface design (human-computer interaction); (or computer support for cooperative work (CSCW) (computer-mediated human interaction ); and educational or instructional design. (See Table 1: "Levels of Design and User Experience".) The 'lower' levels are defined by technical fields, while the 'higher' levels are defined by fields which are increasingly social in their concerns.

Table 1: Levels of Design and User Experience

Instructional design
---------------------------
CSCW
---------------------------
User interface
---------------------------
Applications
---------------------------
Networking
---------------------------

Typically design either takes place at one of these levels, or is intended to direct information (such as design requirements) from one level to another. One has only to glance at the recent research literature to find that the majority of studies are organized along disciplinary lines to focus on mainly one level of user experience. There are also increasing examples of arguments for the use of information at one level to inform design at another level, as when ethnographic or laboratory usability studies are offered for use in software development.

I want to draw attention to a different relationship: users' experience at one level can affect their experience at another level. User experience can be affected negatively or positively. This is a point inspired in part by the
observations of social psychologists of telecommunications in the 1960s and 1970s. They argued for 'holistic' or' gestalt' effects of media designs on user experiences, and often took a phenomenological approach to understanding
the effects of media on human interaction. The overall experience of audio-video systems, for example, is such that, compared to text messaging systems such as electronic mail, people tend to be less argumentative and behave more on a personal basis, rather than task-governed fashion. (Short et al., 1976; Williams, 1977; Rutter, 1984) Their work has largely fallen to the wayside recently in favor of investigating more specific and clearly measurable effects of technology design choices (Finn et al., 1997).

In many cases, however, the specific design of a technology is not the central concern. Using information technologies often means embedding them in a complex context of use. In such a context of use, non-technical arrangements are not only important, but actually interact with the technical arrangements in the experience of users. (Cf. O'Day et al., 1996)

Education is certainly a complex setting. In a course, technologies are used to support access by people to other people and to media materials such as texts, all of which are supposed to be organized to produce course plans and curricula. What I want to suggest is that students experience (which I take as indicated by their overall feelings about and actions in a course) can be reciprocally determined by social or technical aspects of a course design.

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In the account that follows, I will emphasize two simple examples. On the negative side, technical problems made turn-taking difficult and discouraged seminar participants from engaging fully in the discussion. However, the mechanics of turn-taking can be helped with a variety of social measures. The design implication of this observation is that future courses should make sure to provide all the social support for turn-taking possible. On the positive side, interest in the course contents probably helped participants endure a variety of technical problems. Thus, as most educators are aware, contents are important and should be emphasized to reduce the effects on students' experience of a course of process difficulties such as those arising from technical problems.

Research for the empirical account was commissioned by Sweden-Silicon Valley Link after the course was finished. It is based on post-hoc interviews and written reports from faculty and staff. Written evaluations by students were available from the Royal Institute, but were not available from Stanford. For this reason, most of the statements about student experience, although central to the account, are made by inference.

I begin by explaining how the course was designed and implemented. Then I describe the experience of students, faculty and staff. In a discussion of the account, I focus on the technology-driven character of the course design,
and in the conclusion I offer some suggestions on how to make the best of a given technical arrangement with support in the educational design.

DESIGN AND PLANNING

The key to this experiment was the use of wider bandwidth than usual in academic telecommunications. At the same time, in order to allow for eventually low-cost multimedia communications, this experiment used communications protocols consistent with the global Internet (TCP/IP). (Watson and Sasse, 1996) The cost of increased bandwidth was also held down with multiplexing. Multiplexing allows streams of data to be divided for transport and recombined at the end point, and is becoming an increasingly common practice in many domains of telecommunications. (Roche, 1990)

The multiplexed Internet link was engineered and mainly arranged by the Royal Institute. The Swedish telecommunications carrier Telia would provide five European-standard E1 (2 million bits per second (Mbps)) lines from the Royal Institute which would be transferred with an inverse multiplexer onto a SONET transport stream and transmitted on undersea fiber-optic lines. Each E1 stream would be converted to the US-standard T1 (1.5 Mbps) at White Plains, New York, and then conveyed to the Stanford campus on AT&T fiber, terminating
a kilometer from the classroom. (Brage, 1996; Cordero, 1995; Cordero, 1996; Cordero, Harris, et al., 1996; Harris and DiPaolo, 1996)

At Stanford, seminar meetings were to be held in an amphitheater-style classroom which the campus television service (Stanford Instructional Television Network (SITN)) had already equipped for multimedia presentations
and video production. The room already had a large projection screen at the front and two wall-mounted video monitors which would be used for full motion video, aerial microphones over student seats, and loudspeakers. In addition, a smaller projection screen would be set up for speakers' whiteboard slides. (Stanford Center for Professional Development, 1996; Stanford University, 1996)

At the Royal Institute, a similar production room was used, specially constructed for the purpose of this experiment.Two monitors displayed video from Stanford. There were three cameras: one for documents, the other two for views of the speaker and audience. Microphones were installed in front of seats in the audience, each with a button for the speaker to press to turn the microphone on.

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The Royal Institute donated most of the special equipment and software necessary for the experiment, with additional gifts from Sun Microsystems. The video stream would be translated in both directions between the European standard (PAL) and the American standard (NTSC). Stanford-generated video would be captured and compressed by a Silicon Graphics Indigo workstation, while another Indigo would decode and decompress incoming video. The whiteboard application, an MBone tool named WB, would be run on a Sun Microsystems SS5 (Sparc) workstation. Another Sparc workstation would be used for network control (Department of Teleinformatics, 1996).

In the rear of the classroom there was a projection room in which an SITN technician and a Stanford technician controlled video and audio production. A short distance away from the classroom, a windowless room housed the workstations. In this room, another technician selected among different video camera feeds to send to the Royal Institute.

The entire production group used headsets to speak to each other and to the Royal Institute on a separate channel over the link. For instance, if the levels of transmissions from the SITN production control room were too low, the Royal Institute staff could tell Stanford staff to raise the levels. When this intercom channel failed, ordinary telephone calls were used to Sweden.

Pedagogically, the idea was to adapt an existing Stanford course format to make it accessible to and benefit from the Royal Institute students, faculty and their Swedish associates. For more than five years previously, Stanford's Electrical Engineering Department had offered communications design seminars at least once annually as a way to provide students with a broad view of current telecommunications issues, including viewpoints from industry as well as universities. Later the seminars were regularly videotaped and televised. After that, the seminars had adopted a more responsive format, in which students would question speakers by email after an initial presentation andspeakers would discuss student questions in a second course session.

With the decision to experiment with a communications link between Stanford and the Royal Institute, the instructor on each campus jointly decided to alternate speakers from the Stanford area and the Royal Institute area, and attempt to extend the opportunity for dialog to students, faculty and invited speakers at both ends of the link. The course schedule would rotate three types of seminar meetings: speakers from Sweden, speakers from Silicon Valley, and group discussion with a mixed panel of speakers. (See Table 2: "Schedule of Speakers.") For students at both campuses, the course would be a low-credit extra course. The requirements for credit would be attendance and some audience participation.

Table 2: Schedule of Speakers

Introduction
April 2 - "Introduction to the Seminar Series and Globalization of Education Experiment" Dale Harris, Stanford University; Bjorn Pehrson, Royal Institute of Technology

Broadband technology and networks
April 9 - "ATM: Status and Applications" Fred Sammartino, ATM Inc.
April 16 - "Simplicity as a Design Criterion in Telecom Systems" Torbjorn Johnson, Ericsson Telecom AB
April 23 - Interactive discussion
Panel Speakers: Torbjorn Johnson, Ericsson Telecom; Sverker Lindbo, STOKAB; Stig Persson, Telia Telecom; Lars Ramfelt, Royal Institute of Technology, Teleinformatics; Fred Sammartino, ATM Inc.

Wireless technology and networks
April 30 - Bjorn Gudmunson, Ericsson Radio Systems
May 7 - Don Cox, Stanford University
May 14 - Interactive discussion

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Future broadband and wireless services
May 21 - Lars Eriksson, Telia
May 28 - Eileen Healy, Dataquest
June 4 - Interactive discussion
-------------------------------------------------

THE EXPERIENCE

Students were recruited through special notices and course schedule announcements at both campuses. Mostly engineering students signed up. The students at Stanford were a year or two older than the students in Sweden on average.

At one campus of the Royal Institute, on the northern outskirts of Stockholm, preparations would begin days before a meeting, and then again an hour or two before the course meeting. There were three graduate student technicians in a control room controlling data feed to and from the link, and others assisting in the classroom. There was little set procedure for setting up the apparatus, so each time numerous adjustments had to be made in relation to Stanford, more or less starting from scratch.

There was a disjuncture between SITN's concerns for production, mainly for an analog television audience, and the production of video stream for use in the digital network. This created difficulties in establishing a stable platform
for a period longer than the course meeting, and creating difficulties controlling the equipment during the meetings. In fact, there were problems of coordination at nearly every point, including the establishment of a work schedule for the joint technical staff, requiring both sides to make what they considered to be last-minute sacrifices such as working on Sundays and working well into the night just before a course meeting.

Speakers were asked to prepare for the meetings by using the whiteboard application while giving practice talks. The talks were taped so that the speakers could review them later. This appears to have given speakers at the Royal Institute an advantage over those at Stanford.

In California, the experience was also technically problematic. Preparation for each class began early in the morning, often well before the 8:00 am meeting time. There were numerous points to adjust and test in the long chain between the Royal Institute and the classroom. Many times the production equipment had been re-set for other uses by SITN staff. Preparation for each class included setting up the whiteboard application. Speakers' slides had to be cached in Postscript files, loading each individually, usually taking about half an hour for twenty or more slides.

Shortly into the term, the Stanford staff disconnected the ceiling mikes, partly because they were transmitting too much ambient noise to the Royal Institute, and partly because there were problems with audio feedback between Stanford and the Royal Institute. (This problem is not the same as echo canceling because of the relatively long delay involved in wide-area network systems, and is endemic to such applications). For this reason, a hand-held mike was moved by a teaching assistant to individual students who wanted to speak.

While the course began with an audio channel bandwidth of only 64 kilobits per second (kbps), about half way through the term the technical staff upgraded to CD-quality sound. Despite this improvement, at Stanford there were problems hearing the Royal Institute because the speakers installed in the classroom were not powerful enough to make the audio channel clear to everyone in the Stanford classroom.

There were also problems in the logistics of equalizing and converting the audio on both ends: sometimes the sound was overly amplified or attenuated, other times there were unacceptable delays; sometimes there was unacceptable

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noise. Echoes plagued the channel until late in the term. For this reason, whenever someone at Stanford was speaking, a Stanford technician would turn the Royal Institute-generated audio volume down. This had the desired effect of eliminating echoes and background noise, but also had the undesired effect of reducing the ability of the Royal Institute speakers to interrupt or respond to Stanford speakers. If the operator, who had the full volume the Royal Institute audio in his headphones, was delayed in turning up the volume for Stanford listeners, the Royal Institute speaker would give up.

Audio channel problems meant not only that participants in the seminar had difficulty hearing and being heard, but also had difficulty interacting. It was unclear to interlocutors, for instance, when and how they should take turns speaking. When someone had the floor, they would tend to run on; no one else was inclined to break in. This was especially clear after several meetings of the class had shown that speakers may only be seen moving their mouths on the video while the audio channel was turned down.

The white board equipment and software presented problems for the speakers and the participants in the seminar and the support staff. As first-time and occasional users, speakers found the software was difficult to use, and the three-button mouse of the Sparc workstation confusing for those unaccustomed to it. Participants had difficulty reading slides at the back of the room because of back lighting in the classroom. To remedy this problem, the staff at Stanford gave students paper copies of slides at the beginning of each session.

Stanford staff observed that Stanford students did not participate in discussions as fully as normal, at least in part because of the hurdles to interaction and frequent technical difficulties. The professor at the Royal Institute observed that his students did not participate as much as Stanford students, but that this behavior is not unusual among Swedish students in audiences. Attendance by students was good on both campuses.

PARTICIPANT EVALUATIONS

Students at the Royal Institute felt that the course would have been a success if the technology had worked smoothly. They found the course topic and content interesting. They also largely accepted that the technology was unstable, and felt that they were participating in an important experiment in the history of higher education in their country. Their attitude toward the technology may have been partly the result of the way that the instructor at their campus described the course at its outset: he routinely described the course as an important experiment in telecommunications.

According to the Stanford instructor, however, students on his campus "did not find a lot of value added" in the experiment, both because of the technical problems and because they did not find that the speakers from Sweden represented distinctive European or otherwise diverse perspectives on the issues. The Stanford students who felt that they learned the most from the class were reportedly keenly interested in teleconferencing and the problems of setting up a working system.

In the view of the Stanford instructor and the graduate student who worked with him, the interface platform has to be improved on all fronts, and especially sound. Future platforms should make it easier to hear other speakers, and delays should be reduced for more natural conversation. It will also be necessary to spend more time gathering speakers and making sure that they present a diverse sampling of viewpoints across the field and internationally. Most importantly, the logistical problems that cropped up should be eliminated, either by dedicating all of the equipment in use for the virtual classroom or organizing a standardized procedure and coherent staff for adjusting equipment on both ends each time.

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From the perspective of the professor at the Royal Institute and his support staff, the main problems were the logistical and coordination difficulties. From their perspective future experiments should be different in two specific
ways. There should be an organization with the staffing and management to handle the technical aspects of courses. Also, there should be more time allowed for setting up and testing new network infrastructure and applications. A new organization would allow a long lead time for the installation and testing of new network infrastructure and applications, and coordinate the many parts of the complex technical picture involving Stanford and the Royal Institute around a high speed link.

For all of the students and faculty in the course, the pedagogical value of the course seems to have been somewhat overshadowed by difficulties with the user interface to the network. As in many similar experiments (Finn et al., 1997), participants found that the most problematic channel for interaction was the audio. The partial and total breakdown of communication that cropped up early in the course seems to have added to more specific frustrations, amplifying problems with the course content. Overall, while everyone was interested in the issues, and particularly discussing them with experts on the other side of the world, there was frustration over the technology.

DISCUSSION

This case is unusual among attempts to use new electronic media in education in the technology it used: live audio, video and text, over a very long distance, using internet protocols. As a pioneer in this type of technology, its early success is notable. (Crowcroft, 1997)

But this case is not unusual in its understanding of how to go about using information technology for learning. Despite a recent trademark on the phrase (Hiltz, 1994), "virtual classrooms" have sprung up all over the world (Jordahl, 1995). The recipe is simple enough: Find a real classroom with conventional arrangements: a teacher, students, books, notepads, blackboards and so on. Reinstate some or all of those arrangements in some way using electronic media. Voila! You have entered the future of education.

The trouble is that this kind of approach almost never works. What has generally been missing in the introduction of the new technologies, as more and more people are aware, is a concern with social and educational questions. Too much attention is focused on the hardware and software. Too little attention is invested in how the technologies are to be used, and how media affect the experiences that students have. Many leading efforts now attempt to put people and learning, rather than technology in itself, at the center of attention.

What is more, most leading efforts recognize that the introduction of technology requires re-design of the activities that people engage in for learning. For instance, Hiltz and Turoff aim "not to merely duplicate the characteristics and effectiveness of the face to face class. Rather, we can use the powers of the computer to actually do better than what normally occurs in the face to face class." (Turoff, 1995) For this reason, although Hiltz and Turoff's efforts have taken place under the name of "virtual classroom", a name widely adopted in the first wave of interest in computerizing teaching, their work points to the ironic insight of a later moment: once becoming 'virtual', the a classroom is transformed. The product is partly or wholly virtual, but no longer a classroom.

At the same time, technology-intensive educational designers have to come to terms with the most frequent finding of studies in distance learning: content, rather than mode of delivery, is the most important aspect of a course's success. (Russell,1997; Schlosser, 1994) Technical problems can ruin a course, but media themselves can only make modest positive contributions to students' experience.

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In the experiment between Sweden and California, the problems most apparent to participants concerned the technologies. The types of problems faced by Stanford and the Royal Institute are likely to be problems faced by other institutions which want to do videoconferencing inexpensively, at least for the next decade. Videoconferencing over the internet will move into the reach of more and more educational institutions in the coming years: the cost of bandwidth will drop, new software for videoconferencing over the internet will appear, peripheral equipment will become cheaper, and there will be a growing number of people with the know-how and hands-on experience to fashion similar systems. Many of the problems of usability that participants in the course witnessed are likely also to be increasingly addressed by the growing research effort in that direction as well. However, progress will continue to be slow and videoconferencing between classrooms will continue to be challenging work.

The staff of the course were also aware of problems of coordination. As educators in different locations, time zones, and cultures try to work together, they will likely encounter a variety of complications. In this case, language difficulties, which some of the Americans anticipated, did not materialize, while practical problems of production were greater than anyone expected. The lack of physical co-presence among production staff was difficult, and not only between continents, but even between rooms on the same campus. There were also professional differences between analog audio-visual production staff, trained in television production methods, and a digital production staff, with backgrounds in computer network administration.

What was not apparent to participants was that there were deeper problems with using telecommunications than could be solved with better equipment, better usability or better coordination. Even if the videoconferencing were the best available--using all the resources of CNN, NBC and CBS, for instance--there still would have been changes in communication introduced by the media. The research literature on videoconferencing, in particular, shows
that it is never as direct, lively and informal as face-to-face encounters, but rather tends to trigger lecture-like conversation, particularly when audio quality is poor, as in most low-cost systems. (Finn et al., 1997; O'Conaill & Whittaker, 1997, 124)

At the same time, one of the most robust and interesting findings in the distance and mediated-learning research literatures is that 'distance' is essentially social. The sense of 'remoteness' that students feel in relation to their instructors and other learners has many dimensions, only some of which have to do with spatial distance. Various media of communication, whether it is writing letters, speaking in a group around a table, or listening to cassette tapes, can seem alternately 'remote' or 'close'. Learners' experience of distance is important because their interest,
motivation, and ability to understand all relate to their sense of nvolvement with a course and the people associated with it.

While the dimensions of social and psychological distance is just beginning to be systematically mapped in this literature, it is clear, for instance, that if instructors tailor their communications to particular students, the pupils will that communicative distance is lessened, even if it means that face-to-face conversation is replaced by email. (Moore, 1993; Holmberg, 1995) This means that the social aspects of relationships between people and the
characteristics of the technologies mediating their communication interact. The sense of distance or involvement that students experience is an outcome of both technical and social issues.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to develop at length these observations from the research literature in terms of the case. Following the technology-driven character of the course itself, the information and perspectives generated by course staff during and after the experiment was focused on the technology. For this reason, my suggestions of how to improve the course, which I offer in the concluding section of this article, should be taken as hypotheses for exploration.

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CONCLUSION: NEW WAYS TO OVERCOME DISTANCE

My aim in this article has been to describe in detail one experiment in the use of videoconferencing, but I have also wanted to shed light on more general issues of how to use information technologies in the classroom. I have tried to suggest that one way of making the best of information technologies is to make sure that the social and educational setting in which they are used is designed to compensate for problems arising from technical problems.

This is not to downplay the significance of certain problems in the mechanics of communication, particularly bizarre artifacts of telecommunications such as echoes or delays in speech. These problems are annoying even when peopleknow each other well. However, there are other problems which are more amenable to social means of intervention.

Based on the case study, then, I want to provide illustrations of this argument with four practical suggestions for people who are interested in exploring the use of videoconferencing, particularly of low- or unreliability quality, in educational settings. Similar ideas could be tested with regard to other types of information technology as well.

The first two suggestions arise from specific problems that faculty and students seem to have had with the course: overall frustration with the course, and problems managing turn-taking. The second two suggestions are more general, and are not issues that the largely technology-focused course staff gave much attention to. All of the suggestions can be found in the research literature, but none of them, to my knowledge, have been linked to a more general strategy of using social means to overcome technical problems.

1. Assume that content may be more important than in a conventional class.Curriculum is important. (Sherry, 1996; Eisner, 1994) However, since the effect of technology mediation may be to promote a negative attitude among students toward the course as a whole, the stakes are even higher for innovating educators to develop materials that are interesting, relevant, and well-organized. In the case described here, although one of the strengths of the course was its advertised topic, improving its contents probably would have strengthened students positive experience of the course.

2. Assume turn-taking may be hampered by the technology. The technical problem in low-cost videoconferencing systems which probably has the greatest effect on the mechanics of interaction is their poor support for naturalistic, rapid-fire conversation. Since technical difficulties in the audio channel make turn-taking difficult (O'Conaill & Whittaker, 1997; Whittaker & O'Conaill, 1997), discussions can be mediated by a designated
person to facilitate turn-taking. Raising hands would allow students and others to speak at their own initiative, for example. Requiring that all students speak in the first session, also, may encourage students to get
involved and feel more comfortable doing so. In the case described above, such measures may have encouraged students to actively participate in the discussion.

3. Provide alternative opportunities for contact and spontaneity.Although it is now held to be important in pedagogical practice to allow students to have less formal and more open-ended interaction with peers, instructors and course materials, it may be difficult to provide the kind of interaction possible using 'wired' or 'virtual' analogs of conventional classroom arrangements. Instead, it may be necessary to institute discussions in
different settings. Thus, in course described here, if the videoconferencing part of the course had been presented as a spectacle with little interaction between speakers and listeners (a minimally responsive, one-way or pre-recorded lecture series), the problems of being able to take control of the floor, of hearing and understanding interlocutors, and the general reliability of the media, would not be issues or as important. Then, if course staff wanted to preserve an opportunity for discussion, various alternative fora could be provided for students, such as face-to-face, local discussion groups, or email or other asynchronous text messaging.

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4. Encourage participants to forgive the technology.Although the contributions of the technology itself are generally null to modest, as I noted above, a positive or negative attitude toward that aspect of a course can affect the overall experience that students and others have in a course. For this reason, it is necessary to motivate participants to be patient with technical problems just as instructors regularly attempt to convey the significance and relevance of course material. In the case, it appeared that sometimes frustrations with the technology spilled over to
reduce the positive feeling of students and others toward the course. On the other hand, it may have been true that the Royal Institute instructor's billing of the course as an historic experiment may have predisposed his students toward a more favorable outlook on the course.

In the case described, strengthening the social and educational arrangements so as to compensate for the technical problems would have required more work on the part of course staff. There would have to be tests of how well the equipment supports interaction before the course starts, and not simply tests of the equipment. But that would not be very much work compared to making the technology perfect--if indeed, such an achievement were possible.

One of the virtues of this strategy is its simplicity. Once technical barriers to interaction are identified, it does not take a great deal of study or training to be able to think of social arrangements such as those I have enumerated. What it does require is thinking 'outside of the box' of supposed technical analogs to conventional classroom arrangements.

In the long term, this strategy may make important contributions to the evolving practice of using new technologies in the classroom. It is widely understood that the process of introducing new media will require social as well as engineering knowledge. Accommodating technical limitations with educational design provides a direct path toward integrating social and technical aspects of new courses.

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Stanford Center for Professional Development (1996). Shared classroom concept reaches new dimension. Stanford Center for Professional Development Newsletter: 2.

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Turoff, M. (1995, March 7-10, 1995). Designing a Virtual Classroom [TM]. Paper presented at the International Conference on Computer Assisted Instruction ICCAI'95, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. http://www.njit.edu/njIT/Department/CCCC/VC/Papers/Design.html

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Watson, A. and M. A. Sasse (1996). "Evaluating audio and video quality in low-cost multimedia conferencing systems." Interacting with Computers 8(3): 255-275.

Whittaker, S., & O'Conaill, B. (1997). The role of vision in face-to-face and mediated communication. In K. E. Finn, A. J. Sellen,& S. B. Wilbur (Eds.), Video-mediated communication (pp. 23-49). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Williams, E. (1977). Experimental comparisons of face-to-face and mediated communication. Psychological Bulletin, 84(5), 963-976.

Persons interviewed

Cordero, Carlos. Research Engineer, Center for Telecommunications, and Ph.D. Candidate, Telecommunications Department, Stanford University (30 August 1996).

Danielson, Magnus. Research Engineer, Telecommunication Systems Laboratory, Teleinformatics Department, Royal Institute of Technology (the Royal Institute) (29 October 1996).

Erixon, Mats. Research Engineer, Telecommunication Systems Laboratory, Teleinformatics Department, Royal Institute of Technology (the Royal Institute) (29 October 1996).

Hagstrom, Karin. Local Project Coordinator, Sweden-Silicon Valley Link (10 September 1996).

Harris, Dale. Director, Center for Telecommunications, and Professor, Telecommunications Department, Stanford University (28 August 1996).

Maleki-Tehrani, Ardavan. Staff Member, Center for Telecommunications, and Ph.D. Candidate, Telecommunications Department, Stanford University (18 September 1996).

Pehrson, Bjorn. Director, Telecommunication Systems Laboratory, and Professor, Teleinformatics Department, Royal Institute of Technology (20 September 1996).

Schagerlund, Olov. Ph.D. Candidate, Industrial Transformation Laboratory, Teleinformatics Department, Royal Institute of Technology (25 October 1996).

Biographical note:

Jon Guice is a sociologist with a doctorate from UC San Diego's Science Studies Program, and the author of ethnographic and historical studies of information technologies. His current research interest is in design of multimedia communications. In addition to working with Sweden-Silicon Valley Link, he consults in industry and education.

Author's address:

Building 370
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-2120
email: jguice@concentric.net

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