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Conferences are one of those catch-22s of professional life. Everyone agrees
they are necessary. You learn important things and make useful contacts.
Nevertheless, it's sometimes difficult to get people there.
Ask journalism professor Carol Pardun.
As a divisional head of the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass
Communication (AEJMC), organizing their regional conferences is a big part of
her work. Not as many people were attending as she and her fellow organizers
would have liked.
She and her colleagues decided to host a conference people could attend without
leaving their offices.
On July 25, the Mass Communication and Society Division of AEJMC hosted a
virtual conference on Media and Adolescent Health. About 20 people showed up --
by accessing a web site.
They were sent the web site address well in advance of the conference. When
they accessed the site on July 25, they had a live video image of the
conference hosts and speakers on screen -- and e-mail links so they could
contact them with questions.
The virtual conference was done with webcasting -- basically, broadcasting over
the Internet. Most of us are familiar with streaming media -- a process where
sounds and images are sent in a continuous stream over the Internet instead of
in separate files that must be downloaded before playback. It's how we listen
to radio files from a radio station web site or watch video clips on our
computers.
Webcasting is streaming media -- except it's a "form of live streaming -- the
broadcasting of a one-time event," according to Todd Stabley, a multimedia
specialist for the Center for Instructional Technology.
Webcasting has been in use on the Carolina campus for five years -- going back
to the infancy of the technology. Campus radio station WXYC was the first radio
station to broadcast live on the Internet. iBiblio -- formerly Metalab -- in
the School of Information and Library Science began broadcasting live musical
performances in the spring and summer of 1995.
Nevertheless, setting up the conference for the first time was a process
requiring its share of preparation and teamwork.
The broadcast studio in the journalism school has all the necessary equipment
for a traditional television broadcast, said Stacey Cone, the graduate student
liaison for AEJMC.
And they set up a web site from which everyone could participate in the
conference easily enough.
But they had to prepare that signal originating in the studio for transmission
over the Internet.
The signal was sent from a television camera to a Carolina Computing Initiative
computer, where a capture card turned it into a digital signal -- a signal a
computer can recognize, consisting of 1s and 0s, according to Tom Cox.
Cox is manager of video services for the Center for Instructional Technology
and on the School of Education's clinical faculty.
The signal was then compressed by encoding it with Real Producer software on
the same CCI computer. This makes the signal manageable by Internet connections
of widely varying capacities.
They did a couple of practice runs beforehand. In one session, Cone used her
computer at her home in Winston-Salem to access the web site and
videoconference with Cox on the Carolina campus.
Thanks to the help of Cox, his colleagues in Video Services and journalism
graduate student Tim Bajkiewciz (a former television producer), the technical
side of the conference turned out to be easier than anyone anticipated, Cone
said.
And in one important sense, the webcasting conference didn't differ at all from
a traditional one.
Much of the work was in organizing and coordinating the efforts of large
numbers of people, Cone said.
In any case, the work was worth it.
Pardun said that this first conference taught her what capacities Carolina has
for hosting webcast conferences and what the possibilities are for the
future.
"There weren't a lot of participants, but that was, in part, by design."
"We didn't push it [this first conference] too hard because we wanted to see if
the whole thing could work. We wanted to see if people could e-mail in and if
the streaming worked smoothly.
"And," she added, "everything worked really well."
Pardun said that future virtual conferences could end up with more than 100
attendees.
It's natural that the organizer of a conference should immediately focus her
concern on how to do it next time around -- and on how many people could show
up.
Guest speaker Jane Brown is still upbeat about the conference that just took
place.
"It was a lot of fun," she said, "and Carol's a great interviewer."
Brown is the James L. Knight Professor of Journalism and co-author of Media,
Sex and the Adolescent. She's also currently studying the effects of
anti-violence public service announcements on adolescent audiences.
While Brown said she likes to see people face-to-face, she added that webcast
conferences have the advantage of allowing people who can't physically attend
to participate.
She thinks the July 25 conference is a forerunner of many webcast conferences
to come.
"It's certainly less expensive than flying everybody into one place," Brown
said. "Lots of businesses are using them already routinely."
For more information on holding a virtual conference using webcasting, contact
the Center for Instructional Technology at cit@unc.edu
Sponsored by the Technology in Context Consortium
Writer: Kevin O'Kelly
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