Tech Ed Annual Conference
| Date | 01 June 2005 |
| Pages | 4-6 |
| Published date | 01 June 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050510613774 |
| Author | Julia Gelfand,Henry Mondschein |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Tech Ed Annual Conference
Julia Gelfand and Henry Mondschein
4LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 5 2005, pp. 4-6, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050510613774
The 10th TechEd International
Conference and Exhibition was held in
Pasadena, California, April 5-6, 2005.
Surprisingly, the enrollment for this
landmark promoted conference was
among the smallest I can remember.
This must reflect the tight financial and
travel resources of the primary
attendance which is community college
instructors, personnel, librarians and
associated staff. This year, it also
seemed like there was more
representation of the K-12 instructional
ranks and a more regional
representation than a national or
international roster.
There were many half and full-day
workshops prior to the start of the
conference. The one keynote speaker I
heard was Robert C. Hagerty, Chairman
of the Board, CEO and President of
Polycom (www.polycom.com) who
talked about the product line his
company has developed to encourage
different kinds of teaching through the
use of videoconferencing and other
technologies. He took the audience on a
legacy of classroom education from the
traditional blackboard/chalkboard/
whiteboard environment through the
launch of the first film shown in
classrooms in 1910 and taking field
trips to the outdoors and the launch of
central computing which soon became a
distributed computing model. The
contemporary scenario is wired
everything with mobile, wireless,
video, and real global connectivity
allowing for voice and video
integration, use of PDAs, Notebook
applications and soft phones.
Tomorrow's world will be fully
interactive where classrooms may
resemble a newsroom where voice,
video, data and the web is totally
unified and we work and reside in a
transparent technology arena. This
convergence will decrease barriers and
increase a common computing
architecture, SIP. Hagerty sees
solutions on the horizon for firewalls
and is anxiously awaiting the new
algorithm, H324M for work with video
content and transmission.
The collegiate experience will be
increasingly internet intensive and
communication technologies gaining
use. The fact that instant messaging is
growing by 24 percent annually and
universal connectivity working more
effectively and video override IP or
VOIP being heavily deployed on
college campuses, makes this all seem
reasonable. The wireless penetration
among K-6 students is 32 percent from
2001-2004 and 42 percent among
middle school students and 37 percent
for high school students. For higher
education, the wireless coverage has
grown from 32 percent to 70 percent
with one of the best examples of
comprehensive wireless being the work
done at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, Ohio.
The new forthcoming technology
according to Hagerty is WiMax for new
wide area coverage. The changes in
schooltechnologies areshown in Table I.
The current challenges and those
that lie ahead include:
.Digitial divide.
.Geography.
.School budgets.
.Dual enrollments.
.How to prove student success.
We know that students learn better in
environments with mixed employment
of teaching techniques. Some keys to
success with technology are:
.Ease of use.
.Content is king ± ``world is your
classroom''.
.Applications for training are plen-
tiful ± use and create Centers for
Instructional Learning, etc.
The presentation ended with an
inspiring video conference clip of
success stories that demonstrated the
equaling of technology in a rural school
district in Imperial County, California
and how the Museum of Television and
Radio in Beverly Hills was a strong link
for students in this school even though
it was a significant distance away. It
was easy to conclude that technology
heightens motivation and improves the
communication/presentation skills of
teachers and students alike.
A program ``Obtaining eText from
Publishers: Tips and Tricks for Service
Providers'' called for the major
responsibility to be placed on the
publishers to prepare new formats.
California legislation now obligates
publishers to provide eContent in order
to be ADA compliant for visually
impaired, hearing impaired and for
students with learning disabilities. Part
of the membership of societies that
support audio recording for the visually
impaired is now increasingly available
on CD-ROM with value-added
resources complementing material. The
focus is on textbooks and methods to
translate content from one format to
another is the major method with
scanning being the primary activity. A
repository at the California State
University Northridge campus contains
about 1,500 titles with 4,000 eFiles that
reflect content from the following
sources:
.Mainstream publishers represent-
ing 80 percent of needed books in
classrooms.
.Smaller textbook publishers where
a personal relationship between
staff in the repository and teachers
has evolved.
.Trade book publishers seeking new
customers.
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