Video Conferencing

St Simon Stock RC School in Maidstone and St Edmund's RC School in Dover are having new videoconferencing facilities installed courtesy of three partner companies. Aethra, one of the world's leading manufacturers of videoconferencing equipment together with distributors Medium UK, and local company CDEC, are installing a room system that is state of the art. Comprising flat panel screens at front and rear of the classroom, Hitachi interactive whiteboard, and an Aethra videoconferencing unit, the installation is being provided by local distributor CDEC. The system replaces the existing equipment which has been used for the past two years to provide teaching links between RE departments in the Catholic Secondary Schools. The new equipment is the next generation, and substantially reduces the space taken, and offers additional facilities including integration of the whiteboard with the conferencing, and providing DVD and CD facilities. For further information contact the eCurriculum Strategy Team on e-curriculum-strategy@kent.gov.uk

A video conferencing training session was held today for five primary schools around Folkestone, hosted at the Churchill school. The session was aimed at building relationships within the group and increasing teachers awareness and confidence, in using the video conferencing equipment that had been installed at the schools as part of an MFL project. Heather Pettit from SEGfL also introduced the group to some of the other video conferencing content providers via the Global Leap project.

 

By the end of the session, all the schools had been registered with both the Global Leap website and the JANET Video Conferencing Service (JVCS) which can be used to connect the schools to other national video conferencing users. First conferences have also been arranged between the schools to get them into the swing of using the technology.

 

Heather also showed the group the excellent and FREE resource for all schools from the National Archives called learningcurve. It has vast amounts of resources digitised from what was previously known as the Public Records Office.

Insight into the value of distance learning and related classroom conferencing

Industry Analyst, Dr. S. Ann Earon, recently appeared on an AGT webinar to discuss the latest trends in the use of video, audio and web conferencing in the classroom. Click the following link (or copy/paste into your browser), register, and then, enjoy a 20 minute presentation on this topic:

http://www.appliedglobal.com/content/register/InfoForm.aspx?app=ConfClass

Please click on the link below for the Video Products Lifecycle Notice from Polycom, Inc. communicating that certain exising models of the VSX family - the VSX 6000, 7000, 7400 and 7800 - are entering a term of  "Sustaining" engineering, service and support on December 31, 2005.

Video Products Lifecycle Notice

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." -- A. J. Liebling, The Wayward Pressman

Blogging advocates were justifiably pleased last week when the state Supreme Court in Delaware overturned a lower court's decision that required Comcast to reveal the identity of a blogger who had written about Patrick Cahill, a town councilman in Smyrna; Cahill and his wife sued for defamation. The lower court allowed the Cahills to subpoena Comcast's records in an effort to find out who they were suing, but the Supreme Court said that they had not done enough to find out who the blogger was.

Of more importance was that the Court mentioned, in its 34-page ruling, that blogs are generally opinion, and are therefore not subject to defamation lawsuits. "Given the context, no reasonable person could have interpreted these statements as being anything other than opinion. ... The statements are, therefore, incapable of a defamatory meaning," wrote Chief Justice Myron Steele.

That wasn't the only news on the blog front. Google announced a while back that it had created a search system for blogs, so Yahoo went one better, by announcing that it would put bloggers side by side with "legitimate" news sources on its website. That's created a minor stir in the journalism business.

Journalists are a funny lot (we grew up in the newspaper business, so we've been around a lot of them). In addition to feeling like they're deserving of a free lunch for attending your event, they also like to feel that they know what's going on -- virtually all the time, and under all circumstances. That attitude, for decades, was reinforced, if only because newspeople (mostly of the print variety) WERE the only people who would find out about and say what was going on.

"The superficiality of newspaper coverage is without excuse; public characters appear as on a child's drawing, two-dimensional and without perspective. All that is lacking is the childish charm. That is not the fault of the reporters but of their employers, who will neither invest in thorough reporting nor even sanction it, because it might disturb their own concept of the world they live in." -- A. J. Liebling, Op cit.

Over the last 50 years or so, though, journalists have fallen on the integrity index, in part because of television (it's pretty hard to be a journalist when you can't write three consecutive sentences and have to condense a story into a 20-second item before cutting to Joe on sports); in part because people don't read (newspaper circulation in the US has been steadily dropping, and reporters don't get paid that well); and in part because getting a story, even if it's just the regurgitated pablum offered up at a staged news conference, is more important than getting THE story, which is usually real work -- the regurgitation is where the buffet is, but identification of the pablum isn't a consideration.

So the controversy is pretty straightforward: On the one hand, some would allow people with opinions distorted by either a lack of or ignorance of facts to be given the same status on the legitimacy index (and the same legal protections) as those who would actually research and report; and on the other, they would allow them standing as "journalists" without their ever having to go out and actually research a story simply because they're willing to express an opinion and have the computer skills and time to do so.

NOTE: we're not suggesting for a minute that people aren't entitled to their opinions, and they aren't entitled to use the means at their disposal to express them. However, I can hit an 18-foot jump shot, but that doesn't make me Michael Jordan.

 Welcome!