Education in the Telepresence Space
2007.06.07 by John Serrao
Dr. R Shaun Edmonson of thereNow inc., a company that specializes in telepresence based education, spoke on the subject during the last day of Telepresence World. He was talking about how national education policy focuses its energy on large expenditures on technology for schools yet this technology never catches on or impacts the educational experience. He showed an interesting cycle of technology adoption in the educational space:
- Introduction (Excitement)
- Research (Promise)
- Implementation (Problems)
- Adoption (Disappointment)
- Blame (Teachers)
The blame game is brought about because the ROI metric of education, test scores, never seem to be moved by the technology. Edmonson sees telepresence finally breaking this cycle because of its ability to facilitate 'cognitive apprenticeship' - a process by which a teacher shows you how to do something, you try to do it and then you get pointers from those teachers on how you did. Cognitive apprenticeship is seen by Edmonson as the best learning tool available and he cites telepresence technology as the first educational technology that facilitates this process rather than replacing it. Telepresence works on modeling, observation and talking - the studies thereNow performed backed up this hypothesis.
Later in the day we were joined by Dr. Helmuth Trefftz from Universidad EAFIT in Medellin, Columbia. He offered guidance on the direction of telepresence adoption in the developing world, saying Columbia wants to deploy 100 distance learning programs through 49 universities by 2010. They want to use the Renata, the Columbian version of Internet2, to deliver these services.
Trefftz contribution to the telepresence movement is a very interesting piece of software that enables interactive 3D modeling environments to be shared simultaneously across the web. The open-source software is written with very low bandwidth requirements in mind; only the coordinates being used in the 3D models are transferred and then reconstructed on each meeting participants PC. This system does not require high-end PCs to function properly.
Trefftz software development team has an ambitious goal: to create a freely available content library that acts as the backbone of Columbia's Distance Learning Program. They also want this library to be distributed via their software and telepresence hardware.
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