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The Medium Rescues the Message
12/11/2001
The Media Arts Academy at Los Angeles Valley College is a leader in bringing
both the teaching and the application of new media into the classroom. With
an emphasis on technical expertise, the program has trained many professionals
in the news and entertainment industries. Recently, LAVC began using video conferencing
not only to deliver a course in media studies, but as the medium for a collaboration
involving students, faculty, and institutions in two countries.
Alan Sacks, an Emmy Award-winning director and producer and chairman of the Media Arts Academy, teaches a course called “Mind, Media, and Society.” Although Sacks has always taught the course at the school’s Van Nuys, Calif., campus, a scheduling conflict prevented him from being able to do that last year, because the film he was working on was shooting in Toronto. (The film, The Color of Friendship, later won an Emmy Award.)
Not wanting to forgo teaching his LAVC course during filming, Sacks sought a partner in Canada to help him teach his Van Nuys students using distance-learning technologies. The collaborator he found—Derrick de Kerckhove, director of the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology—was not only willing to work with Sacks, but wanted his own graduate students to participate in the course.
Sacks and de Kerckhove redesigned the course to bring together media experts and critics from both the United States and Canada in a series of joint lectures delivered via video conferencing.
For three weeks, Sacks taught his course in real time from a studio at the University of Toronto. Using a Tandberg 6000 video-conferencing system, he could see and communicate with his students directly. Says Sacks: “At first, students were focused on the technology, but within five minutes, the TV screen disappeared for them and we were talking as though I was right there in the room.”
Sacks, who had attended campus seminars on the use of video-conferencing equipment, says he was able to use the cameras to zoom in on particular students, comment on whether they were attending to the discussion or doodling, and address them individually or in groups. In addition to conversing as though they were in the same room, he and his students were also able to pass hard-copy documents and software back and forth using the system’s built-in document camera and scan converter.
Lou Albert, director of staff development at LAVC, notes that although the school had used video conferencing in spot applications in the past, Sacks’ course was the first time the technology had been applied to several class sessions over a period of weeks.
“It was a unique experience,” he says. “The technology is so good now that students and faculty forgot it was there, and they talked as if they were all together.” Albert points to developments in video-conferencing hardware that improve transmission speeds to virtually eliminate audio delays and technology that allows users to connect multiple endpoints at one time.
De Kerckhove notes that his university has used video-conferencing tools since 1994. “I have offered many of my courses to and from afar, in Europe, the U.S., and Japan,” he says. “It is an ideal format to support face-to-face contacts when the real thing is not available. The voice quality is usually quite good, and that is what counts.”
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