Hamilton College - Instructional Support - Remote Collaboration Facility

This semester, we are using the RCF as a means for conducting meetings with public officials. I currently have two students doing a study in cooperation with New York State. The supervisor of the project in Albany wants to be involved in the conduct of the study, but driving here every week would be time-consuming. So we meet every Wednesday at noon in the RCF, and the state official just walks down the hall in his building to a conference room equipped with videoconferencing capability. It works great.

Yael Aronoff, Instructor in Government (Spring 2001)

I used the video-conference facility twice this semester, for the first time. Due to the successes of both conferences, I am encouraged to use the facilities in my future classes. Had it not been for the opportunity to have video-conferences, my classes would not have been exposed to hearing these interesting lecturers due to the cost and time that it would have taken for the speakers to come to Hamilton.

For my class on Middle East Peace Negotiations, Govt. 207, we had Professor Fareed Abdel-Nour, from San Diego State University, give us an excellent lecture on the Palestinian perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as differences that arise due to the different approach that the Palestinian teams have taken toward negotiations as opposed to the Israeli teams. Professor Abdel-Nour stressed that the Palestinians focus on an approach based on justice while the Israelis focus on hard bargaining. All ten students all had a chance to ask him questions, and we had a good discussion with him through the video-conference as well. The students all found the experience very worthwhile and had a much better understanding of Palestinian perspectives due to the video-conference. For many of the students, it was their first experience with a video-conference, and they also enjoyed having a different format to the class than we normally do.

For my U.S. Foreign Policy class, Govt. 290, we had Professor Marshall Shulman from Columbia University give us a lecture on U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union during the Carter Administration. Marshall Shulman not only has written extensively on the subject, but was the main advisor to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance on policy toward the Soviet Union during the Carter Administration. He gave us both a theoretical and a personal, insider's account of the making of foreign policy, emphasizing the influence of the different bureaucracies on U.S. Foreign Policy. He spoke of the different approaches that the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State had toward the Soviet Union, and how that impacted U.S. foreign policy. Although there were 34 students in the class, all had a chance to ask questions and most did. We all had an interesting discussion. The students all enjoyed getting a first hand account of foreign policy making. For many, it was their first time participating in a video-conference and they all were very enthusiastic about the experience.

Gillian Gane (Videoconference with Jill Allen,'00, College 130, October 2000)

On our syllabus for the Fall 2000 College 130, Coming of Age in America, we scheduled a presentation by Hamilton Class of 2000 alum Jill Allen on the topic of disability. When Jill told us that her mother wouldn't be able to drive her to Hamilton from her home in Vermont, we started investigating other means of bringing her to campus. She and the College 130 staff spent months on this: we looked into reserving the one room in Bristol that is said to be wheelchair-accessible (questions were raised about the adequacy of its bathroom for wheelchair users, and we were advised to make a reservation at the Vernon Downs Comfort Inn instead); Jill eventually found a company that could rent her a wheelchair van--at a price--and tried to find a driver who could also provide the personal care she needs. The plan eventually fell apart over problems with insurance for the van. The whole episode was an exercise in frustration--and a sobering education in how difficult it is for wheelchair-users to move around in ways the able-bodied take for granted.

Quite late in this process, as it came to seem increasingly unlikely that Jill would make it to campus, we remembered hearing something about videoconferencing and called Dave Smallen to inquire about it. In the event, it was only the weekend before Jill's presentation was scheduled that she finally let us know that she'd given up on plans to get here in person. Miraculously, even at this short notice Dave Smallen was able to contact people at the University of Vermont (which is close to Jill Allen's home) and set up a videoconference.

On the afternoon of Friday October 20 Jill made two consecutive presentations, each to two sections of College 130 (the videoconferencing room in Christian Johnson being too small to accommodate all four sections at one time). We saw her vividly on the screen, and after her presentation students asked her a number of questions. It seemed to me that our students were more forthcoming than they usually are in our Friday afternoon meetings of all four sections; this I imagine had partly to do with the fact that each group was half the usual size, partly also with the fact that Jill was closer to being a peer of the students than some of the public figures who have recently addressed them--but I believe that it was also a result of the intimacy of the setting: though she was in fact more than 200 miles away, Jill seemed closer to us than a speaker at a podium usually does.

All in all, this was a highly successful event. Now that I have experienced it, I am inspired to imagine many contexts in which videoconferencing could be used to bring our students into contact with people far away. But this particular case is significant for more than technology's ability to transcend distance. Videoconferencing may spare busy and important people from the need to travel--but it can also bring to us those for whom travel is a challenge, can allow a virtual mobility to people that it is particularly important, and particularly difficult, for our students to meet.

Steve Orvis (Videoconference with Jill Allen,'00, College 130, October 2000)

College 130 used the facility because of logistical problems of bringing Jill Allen '00 back to campus. The course looks at disability in parallel with race, class, gender and other systems of social classification, as we study the process of coming of age in America. Jill, connected with her Emerson Grant and senior thesis, spoke quite powerfully to the course last fall, when she was here. We tried to arrange for her to return. Fairly late in the game, it became clear that neither we nor she could arrange the transportation and support services she would need to return to campus for a couple of days. We then chose to use the videoconferencing facility. While it was certainly second-best to actually being there, it was nonetheless a great alternative in the situation, and much cheaper than bringing her here would have been. My students were all very impressed with the technology and had no problem communicating via it. Obviously, a presentation on a TV screen is rarely as powerful as a live one is, but given the circumstances, the facility was a great help.

Thomas Bass (Vietnam War and Its Cultural Legacy, April 2000)

"Beam Me Up, Prof!" We are still developing the transporter beams required for instantaneous transmission of our bodies from one part of the universe to another, but in the meantime, we are getting pretty good at transporting, if not our bodies, at least _pictures_ of our bodies from one part of the world to another. Add a live voice link, and the illusion of conducting an animated conversation with someone thousands of miles away is pretty good. The world is out there, and the technology exists for getting it beamed into our classrooms. So how do we seize the opportunity?

To access the kind of telepresence available to us today, you need two rooms with video cameras capable of being linked to each other via ISDN phone lines, which are fat pipes endowed with enough bandwidth to transmit pictures and voices in two directions simultaneously. Hamilton possesses one of these rooms, seating thirty students, on the third floor of the Christian Johnson building. The keys to the realm are held by Audiovisual Services, one of the helpful groups of people at the College who do their best to keep us linked to the rest of the world. Books, movies, journals, and, yes, videoconferencing, can be summoned for research and classroom use with remarkable alacrity.

Holding one end of the videoconferencing pipe in my hands, I had no trouble thinking of interesting people to put at the other end. If you're teaching a course on contemporary literature, you can beam Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer into CJ. If you want to talk about welfare policy with wonks in Washington, you can gather three of them in a conference room on K Street and mount your own version of "Washington Week in Review." The benefits lie in saving thousands of dollars on airfare and two days of travel time for people who seldom have two days to spare. The technology is good enough that questions and answers can be lobbed back and forth with no more delay than sometimes exists on transatlantic phone calls. "Beam me up, prof!"

Here are the nuts and bolts of how it worked in my spring semester class on the Vietnam war and its cultural legacy. Of the four outside speakers, three of them were beamed into CJ. One "came" from Berkeley; one from New Orleans; and one from Washington, D.C. Thanks to the generosity of the Dean, I was able to give them all a hundred bucks for their time--about an hour and a half, including set-up time and questions following their lectures. The costs for the videoconferencing technology itself ranged from fifty dollars to three hundred and fifty dollars. If you're teleporting someone from another academic institution, the charges will likely be limited to the cost of keeping the phone lines open for an hour. Berkeley surprised us by charging a hundred dollars to use their gear. The costliest link came out of Washington. I was beaming up a political figure, with no academic affiliation, and my inquiries around town were producing no helpful links, until I stumbled on a company in New Hampshire called Proximity. They are video brokers, with access to thousands of sites around the world--in this case, a fancy conference room at Washington's Union Station. Thanks to the generosity of ITS, I was able to add this more-expensive link to the mix. So what was the class reaction to telepresence? Attendance peaked (with students bringing friends and other interested observers) on those days when we were beaming someone into the classroom. The students knew it was a special occasion, and they appreciated the access to figures in the news, Pulitzer prize winners, and renowned academics who otherwise would not have been available to them. The videoconference lectures and discussions became benchmark occasions, returned to over and over again during the semester. We got first-rate speakers at tag-sale prices. I learned a lot. The students learned a lot. The bandwidth is there. Seize it!

Marybeth Barth, Director of Critical Languages Program

A student began his study of Arabic in the Critical Languages Program. He then continued his study of the language in Cairo, Egypt during his junior year. Upon his return to Hamilton, he was interested in pursuing Arabic at levels beyond the traditional format of the Critical Languages Program. The student had proved himself to be an outstanding student of Arabic. The Arabic examiner for the Critical Language Program, who is a professor at Emory University, author of the course textbook, and former director of Middlebury College Summer Arabic Program, was interested in helping a student who was one of those he once described as follows "The students did extremely well on both the written and oral tests...I want to commend the work your tutor is doing and the hard work of the two students. Your students compare to the best of the best in any first-year Arabic program.....I believe your program is quite remarkable and I hope that it will continue to grow and produce the top notch students it has produced thus far .....both have done well on an exam that was most challenging. I have to say that they have done much better than my own students and I am very impressed by their hard work and determination. Their oral exams were outstanding for someone who has done one year of Arabic only." The RCF has enabled this student to continue his study of Arabic at an advanced level.

Paul Gary Wyckoff, (Using Videoconferencing for Outside Speakers, 1998)

Most of you already know that Hamilton has a videoconferencing facility located in room 305 of the Christian-Johnson building. Have you thought about the tremendous potential of this technology to connect your students to experts in the outside world?

The Hamilton RCF (Remote Collaboration Facility) can accommodate 15-20 people. It uses ordinary phone lines to transmit both audio and video signals from off campus. Communication is two-way and simultaneous so that both ends of the conversation can see and hear one another at all times. The outside speaker's face appears on a large TV screen positioned in front of the class. When a member of the class asks a question, the camera in the RCF zooms in on the student to give the outside speaker a close-up of the student's face. To a remarkable degree, this "virtual" discussion is natural; it feels as if the outside speaker has really joined the class.

I am currently using the RCF to connect to speakers for a class on Social Security reform, and I am quite pleased with the results. When compared with a "live" visit of an outside speaker, there are at least three benefits of videoconferencing:

1. Less time and trouble for the speaker. A visit to upstate New York typically takes a day and a half of the speaker's time, and involves the hassles of air and ground transportation. Videoconferencing takes only the actual time of the class meeting, plus ground transportation to the videoconferencing site, if necessary. Most colleges and universities now have videoconferencing facilities, and Kinko's maintains facilities in most major cities which can be rented. Reducing the time and hassles of talking to your class may mean that you can connect to very busy and prominent individuals who just can't take the time for a personal visit.

2. Less expense for the College, and for your department. After honoraria, travel expenses, and accommodations, a "live visit" can easily cost $1000 to $2000. A videoconference, by contrast, ranges in cost from $10-20 (if the visiting speaker has facilities in their organization and we pay only for long distance charges) to $400 (if the speaker has no videoconferencing facilities and we have to rent a facility in their city). Best of all, the costs of videoconferencing are generously funded by the AV department, so there are no costs to your department at all.

3. Less hassles for you. If you've ever arranged a "live" outside speaker, you know what a pain it can be. You have to think about finding a place for the event, you have to worry about what events might be scheduled against it, you have to arrange financing, you have to arrange publicity, you have to figure out who to invite to dinner with the speaker, you have to arrange a pick up at the airport, you worry about how many people will show up - what a headache!.

Of course, when several classes and/or departments are involved, it still makes sense to arrange a "live" visit. If there is widespread interest on campus, it is wonderful to arrange a series of class visits, and meals, with a speaker. But videoconferencing is particularly well- suited for specialized speakers who are of interest only to one class.

Carl Rubino, Edward North Professor of Classics (Experiences in Classics, Spring 1998 & 2000)

Spring 1998 witnessed the first long-distance collaboration between classicists from Hamilton and Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. The twenty Hamilton students in Classical Studies 100 (Socrates, Cleopatra, and Caesar) participated in six interactive events between faculty and students in the "gateway" courses at both institutions. There were two sessions in which Hamilton faculty (Shelley Haley and I) spoke with Skidmore students, two in which with Skidmore faculty spoke with Hamilton students, and two where students from Hamilton and Skidmore engaged in discussion with each other. Practical arrangements for the collaboration began in July, when Dave Smallen and I had two meetings with colleagues from Skidmore. A few weeks later I took part in a virtual conference with colleagues from Lafayette, Hamilton, and Colgate to discuss such collaborations. In September I met with Dave Smallen for a practice session in our Remote Collaboration Facility, and later that month I led a virtual conference between the Hamilton and Skidmore classics faculty to discuss the details of our collaboration. The collaboration was successful, and we decided to continue with such projects in the future.

In Spring 2000, the seven students in Greek 340 (Homer and the Greek Hero) participated in three remote collaborations with a Homer class at Skidmore. On two of those occasions we discussed several pieces of Homeric scholarship, and on the third we held a translation workshop in which the students presented and discussed their versions of selected passages from the Iliad. This second collaboration, which involved a smaller group more suited to the RCF, proved especially successful. We plan to continue with such collaborations in the future.

Collaborative and Research Opportunity Use of the RCF

Amy Lindner, Associate Director of Foundation, Corporation and Governmental Relationships

We recently used the RCF for a tele/videoconfernce workshop presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF now requires all grant proposals to be submitted electronically and the workshop was an overview of their on-line submission system. Prior workshops were presented at regional conferences, but generally were geared toward administrators, who then had to relay that information to faculty members. Lack of funding and time prevented NSF from visiting all of their "customers", as there are thousands across the US and internationally.

The workshop held in and made possible by the RCF allowed NSF to interact directly with its constituency at a minimal cost to all organizations involved. We had five faculty members present. Additionally, the University of Seattle, University of South Dakota, and the University of New Mexico were simultaneously connected and participating in the workshop. Each of the other schools also had five to seven people present.

Doug Eder, Emerson Visiting Scholar and Professor of Biology (2000/2001)

As your Emerson Visiting Scholar I hosted a 3-hour videoconference on academic assessment between Hamilton College and Rider University in New Jersey. As one who is familiar with basic studio structure and procedure, I can attest that the facilities and operations at the Hamilton end were timely and of very high quality. I had controls on my console that allowed me to manipulate camera, documents, and sound, all out of the direct and distracting view of the audience. In short, I could act as my own stage director and producer. Because there was no separate director present, the feedback square in the lower portion of the main screen was very valuable to me in order to monitor and insure the integrity of the outgoing signal. My audience had never "been on tv before," and so it was advantageous for me to project a relaxed and competent atmosphere in order to put my audience at ease. The Hamilton studio made this possible and very easy.

One thing that newscasters appreciate ---and I would too--- is a rolling chair from which to operate. This would have allowed me somewhat easier access to my documents for placement on the ELMO.

Feedback from my audience reinforces the conclusion that we achieved and exceeded the goals of the videoconference. My audience also claimed that the time passed quickly for them (always a good indication that they're enjoyably engaged). As the host, I could relax and manipulate the technology with ease and represent Hamilton College with style.

Frank Anechiarico (Teleconference connection Hamilton /the University of Brussels and New York University, October 2000).

The topic of the session was a comparison of the American and European constitutional systems. The session was part of a course run by NYU and Brussels comparing the American and European systems. My role was to speak about the American constitution.

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