Synchronous Telepresence for Course Enrichment via iChat

Project Description: The assignment was to conduct a semester-long technology-based collaboration with a practitioner towards an instructional goal. I selected to work with a client, Chris Cappelletti, with whom I had previously provided professional development services for video editing and graphic animation.

Chris Cappelletti is a middle and high school teacher at Cuba-Rushford Central School district, Cuba, NY, who wanted to add a guest professional’s voice to his Video Production class. It was proposed to use his editing workstation’s built-in Apple iChat application to facilitate a live two-way video/audio stream. We created user accounts and tested the system’s reliability, then collaborated to come up with some useful lesson activities for his students that would pertain to both video shooting and editing.

After some discussion, I developed a plan and created some learning material for the students to access online prior to the live chat. Each chat session included a brief lecture to go over the online lesson material, and then small groups broke into simultaneous shooting and editing activities with the students. The chat concluded with a brief wrap-up of the topic with the whole group. Mr. Cappelletti served as the facilitator in the classroom, and each session took place within one 42-minute class period.

Each iChat session was also recorded using iChat’s on-board realtime recording system so that everything I saw in my monitor (their classroom) was recorded. The video was then encoded and posted online within the original page associated with that lesson.

Reflection: Projects involving unfamiliar communication technology can elicit unexpected forms of communication behavior. I was fascinated by the students’ immediate adaptation to the chat technology. The classroom Mac Book Pro was used as the video feed for my image stream, and was connected via wireless router. This enabled the students to move my “head” to various places in the classroom to observe, comment, and direct some of the activities. The notion to do this was unplanned, and led to a more intimate dialog with students that felt, for me, much like I was in the classroom.

There were certain aspects of this project that were naive, mainly because of my inexperience. While we were successful in accomplish many of our intended goals, I expected more asynchronous interaction would take place. There were a number of other competing projects that probably took attention away from this project, such as holiday projects and school sports events.

Second, I did not provide a means for Chris to be assessed to ensure that he would recall the procedures properly if he chose to do a similar project with someone less experienced. Third, Chris and I did not formally discuss beforehand how we would orient our roles during the activities. As it turned out, he intuitively assumed the role of a facilitator – and did quite well. However, this aspect could have been a serious problem if he was unsure of his role, and what to do while we were “live”.