proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING

Since the presenter may not appreciate verbal interruptions, using the chat function, and typing in
questions or queues could be quite helpful. To allow the audience to also participate, either audience
members could connect with their laptops, or the host could provide a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Overall, the issue of interruptions and cooperation between the host and presenter is one to explore in more
detail. To what degree would more feedback have helped or hindered? Assuming that the nature was
making the presenter more aware of the audience state, it probably would have helped. As while the host
found the audience to be actually riveted (or appearing to be) keeping exceptionally quiet and attentive -
there came a moment where they may have been a bit lost when the presenter began describing the various
levels of TurnItIn feedback without a visual aid. Here the host could perceive that the presenter was
hampered, slightly, by the lack of in-line audience feedback.
The Presenter Side
Along these lines, in Geneva the presenter set up all of the equipment and tested it in the room the
evening prior to the presentation. The site seemed perfect, and in retrospect probably too perfect. An
excellent place to clip the camera was found whereby the presenter would be looking directly into the
camera while making the presentation. To achieve the mount perspective, the camera was placed on the
top of a broomstick standing directly against a projection screen in the center. The projection screen
seemed to be a good solution, as during these tests, the larger screen and aspect negated problems
associated with desktop realestate. Likewise, the room also provided a neutral background and level of
lighting appropriate for filming.
Backup facilities
One major point that affected delivery was that the facilities planned for the presentation were
locked in the morning. Upon arrival, the controls for the projector had been locked, and the tech staff
could not be found. Likewise the broom had disappeared, and the room was unbearably hot. In light of the
circumstances, a backup site that had been established the previous day was brought into service. The
presenter dragged-in a table and chairs from a commons area, and setup a very rough field site in a
seemingly quiet side corridor. The camera was mounted upside down and the screen angle adjusted to use
the ceiling as a neutral background.
Physically at the backup site, conditions were also far from ideal. A bright ceiling light had come
on automatically and presented a major challenge. Adjusting the position of the table, allowed the
presenter to mask the light without significant impact to the auto-contrast of the camera, and thus could
prepare for the presentation. Likewise, being in the corridor, anyone could walk by at anytime. During the
setup, there was actually a person pushing a very heavy cart about to stock rooms in the building with
bottles of water. The amount of noise created by the cart rumbling through the corridors threatened to
obliviate the speaker’s voice during the presentation. Fortunately, the cart disappeared at about 15 minutes
before the presentation just as the first Skype connection was established.
Just 30 minutes before the presentation, it appeared that the room was once again available. Here
an error of judgment was made by the presenter. Hibernating the system with everything open, the
presenter took a walk with all of the equipment to the planned room. However, upon arrival, the facility
was still not appropriate. Therefore with the clock ticking, the presenter made a quick return to the backup
site, and then had to wait for connections to be restored from the state of hibernation. Some applications
respond well after returning from hibernation, others with network connections required new connections to
be made. After coming out of hibernation, the browser needed to be closed as both WebCT, and
Elluminate were not responding.
When starting Elluminate the second time, it took longer than anticipated to log on, even though
the client was already installed on the remote machine. As the audience had already begun to arrive, the
delay created an unforeseen visual analogy to help underscore the point that one of the major limits to the
technology is in the realities of deployment.
Some of the delay with Elluminate seems to result from it being Java based and competing with
UEL Plus (WebCT also based in Java) for resources while loading. There may also be an issue with the
Conference proceedings of Student Mobility and ICT: Can E-LEARNING overcome barriers of Life-Long learning?” 120