July 4, 2007 – Danny Maas

I really enjoyed Danny’s presentation on videoconferencing in Alberta. I found it informative and it raised several personal issues and concerns. The primary of those issues being the cost benefits of using money to pay for the videoconferencing suites. I come from a school community which has very limited amounts of technology for our student population (we have one computer lab of 30 and a mini lab of 10 for a student population of 500 elementary and junior high school students). For the cost of a suite of videoconferencing technology our school would be able to purchase a wide variety of equipment and software which would allow our students better access to computer technology. While I cannot disagree with the need to offer science and math courses to students who need them to graduate and gain access to University I really feel torn about spending thousands of dollars when there are many other schools that are in need of technologies for their students.
I wonder a lot about the feasibility of using freeware technologies to provide the same access to videoconferencing technologies. While we did not have time to delve into the issues and concerns with using programs such as Skype, MSN, iChat or xmeeting I believe that they could be used to offer the same type of programs that are currently being offered without the costly videoconferencing technology. While the freeware may have some issues there are no guarantees that the more costly suites will not have the same issues.
Another issue raised by Danny’s presentation, which had not occurred to me before, is that of supervision of sites where the videoconferencing is being broadcast. If there is in fact a teacher in the classroom supervising, why couldn’t they be teaching the class? If the teacher needs to be in the classroom for legal reasons then it seems that they should be the one teaching the class. If the teacher does not have the correct qualifications then the cost of the training is nothing compared to the cost of the videoconferencing technology. These issues as well as many others were raised by Danny’s presentation. It will be interesting to see what advances are being made in the area of videoconferencing over the next few years.