Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Week 2, September 30

This afternoon, after a satisfying delivery of the first d school project (an innovation of the instant ramen experience) and necessary debriefing (calming to the sleep-deprived, time-compressed group), I was finally able to open my brain to Educ 391x, Web-based Technologies in Education. The course requires this blog, for which I'm grateful (having long intended to start one), and an immediate immersion into the reaches of technology, with particular focus to areas in which there had been none until very recently.  In our first class last Wednesday and our most recent class today, I recognize and am quite excited about the direct application of this information to Screen 360's development.

Professor Paul Kim offers his own projects as example.  He has taken mobile telephone technology to children in Rwanda, Uganda and Oaxaca, Mexico, to name a few.  He remarked that it took children only an hour to figure out how to turn on a mobile device, get into it and learn the digital games.  (Adults sometimes took days to figure it out.)

Particularly interesting for Screen 360 is Webconferencing.  WebX, GLORIAD and Internet II were introduced as modes for conducting conferencing internationally.  Kim mentioned the capacity for huge amounts of data like a High Definition video of orthoscopic surgery transmitted at three gigabites per second to a foreign medical school and listed various examples of GLORIAD  or Internet II being used to bring musical performers together virtually.

LDT cohort member, Tanya Flores, mentioned an international virtual handshake conducted through holographic technology at her former employ, Cisco. 

In 2005, I had attempted to organize a video-conferenced Q&A with the Giffoni Film Festival, whose festival dates in Italy are concurrent with Screen360's at the end of July. My plan was to have screened the same film and open the video-conference between San Francisco audience and the Giffoni audience.  Perhaps with the help of EDUC391x, we'll achieve that sooner than later.

Week 2 isn't as frenetic as the first week of school when class schedules are gelled and all which was to have been set up but wasn't is flashing a red light. Books are ordered, my stolen bicycle has been replaced, and the internet connection to my campus apartment seems at last fluid. 

Technology has been my bain for the past couple of weeks but I think that has passed and I can finally dig into it to make it the tool I came to master.