Virtual Seminars

Virtual or ‘e’ seminars : a concept whose time has come?

For the past few years, collaboration with both the UK’s Royal Geographical Society Quantitative Methods Research Group and the US University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, we have been promoting the idea of international e-seminars. These run much as the usual university seminar and are aimed primarily at the graduate student level but with some important differences:

• Through the WUN and its collaborators we are able to arrange for presentations from some of the world’s leading authorities in the chosen fields;
  
• We use the Marratech™ extended desk-top video conferencing system video and audio-conferencing environment which enables participation from almost anywhere with an appropriate computer and broadband internet link. To date, it has proved a remarkably versatile and stable platform, so much so that several teams have decided to use it in their own collaborative research across the WUN;
  
• In consequence the seminars can be attended by as many participants as our server can accommodate. To date, our ‘record’ has been upwards of 60 people able to attend;
  
• Geographically, and thanks largely to the Pacific Ocean, attendance is possible during the working day for much of the planet (Australia and New Zealand excepted, but see below). To date the seminars have started at 1600 GMT, but this may well be varied in the future;
  
• Because the presentations are digital, we are able archive not only the slides used in each presentation, but also a complete, re-playable video and audio recording as well as a log of the questions asked by the audience as the seminar proceeds. Together, these form an important and rapidly growing resource that via WWW can be drawn upon and re-used by instructors in their advanced teaching;
  
• Because of the general unfamiliarity of this environment, we have found it necessary to set up short practice sessions in which would-be participants test out their equipment and understanding of the desk-top interface that Marratech™ provides;
  
• Finally, for the more recent series we have been able to pool research resources such as bibliographies, ideas for student follow up work, and suggested intended learning objectives. The economies of scale in this should be evident;
  

Although these series carry no activities for which a formal assessment is appropriate, our hope is that graduate student classes, in particular, will build on them by creating some formal, assessed activity that enables the series to be ‘hard wired’ into their research training programmes. Possible activities might be completion of an individual essay based on some or all of the presented materials, additional local discussion and related project work. Already, these series have been used in this way for advanced credit-bearing work in several US Universities and we have accumulated some experience of what additional activities ‘work’ and what do not.

The virtual environment

All you need to do to participate in a seminar is to establish a broadband link and then visit a specified web URL. Although you can listen in without any further equipment, to participate actively requires that you have a decent quality microphone and speaker headset. Do not, incidentally, rely on those that are provided by you computer: these have a nasty habit of generating really bad feedback. It is also possible to send video using a standard web-cam, but in practice, and with the exception of the chair and presenter, we ask people to switch these off to conserve bandwidth so they are not essential.

There are two ways of entering the seminars.

• The simplest is to point your web browser to the URL given for ‘Java Webstart’, which is http://marratech.wun.ac.uk:8000/launch.jsp?sid=10002 Clicking on this link will install some Java based software on your system. The install sequence is obvious and should give you no problems but we recommend you do this well in advance of the seminar;
  
• Alternatively, you can download a free desktop client (Marratech Pro) from the supplier’s website at www.marratech.com/download/. and from this point to the slightly different URL at http://marratech.wun.ac.uk:8000/connect.jsp?sid=10002 to direct it to the designated website. Note that this client can be used locally to replay any past seminar for which we have a recording and that the company provides some excellent ’help’ and training materials at its website.

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