TransPacific Project Status Blog

Intermim Report April

Interim Report on 2nd Tpic Class
?Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum.
Education 314
Prof. Anita McClain

Introduction:

The second class, Education 314, ?Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum? offered during the Spring Semester of 2005 in the School of Education at Pacific University was chosen by WMC as the class they preferred to receive. We were all agreed that the class we chose had to meet some new and different criteria than the first class, Dr. Thompson?s American Literature class. These were:

∑ The second class had to be an actual functioning American classroom with American students present and participating.
∑ The class would be offered in a regular classroom, not under laboratory conditions in the Berglund Center as had the previous class.
∑ The Chinese students should be able to participate as fully as possible.

The goal of this class, in short, was to better test ?field conditions? rather than carefully controlled laboratory conditions. We wanted to enter a regular class and learn how to conduct a Transpacific Interactive Classroom in the real and chaotic world of a university classroom.

Our original assumption had been that we would have a much smaller Chinese student body than in the previous outing, when Professor Thompson had taught 63 students. However, we actually have had 40+ Chinese students. This was true for several reasons:

∑ Chinese students had enjoyed the initial classroom and found it very exciting to be working with an American teacher. Dr. Thompson?s warm and supportive teaching personality deserves no small amount of credit for their enthusiasm.

∑ A greater number of Chinese students intend to go into the professional field of secondary or college-level teaching than either we or Wenzhou had expected. These students were eager to get initial instruction that might aid them in better preparing for their education.

We are now approximately 12 weeks into the classroom and have conducted no formal assessment. The following conclusions are thus preliminary and subject to later more rigorous analysis.

1) The classroom context, as opposed to the computer lab with its carefully controlled conditions, presents new and different challenges.
a. Description of the set-up: The classroom itself is in an older building, a reconfigured Carnegie library. The room is perhaps 30 by 20, set up so that the instructor is at the wide end, facing a class spread out over an area of about 300 square feet. There are small tables and chairs that are often reconfigured, either by previous classes or by this class itself as the students move furniture around.
b. The room has a traditional black chalkboard rather than a white board. While there are whiteboards to either side, the instructor tends not to use them because of the way the classroom is configured.
c. Technical set-up: Our team is composed of two students. One operates the camera, a small Sony mounted on a tripod. Because the instructor is quite active, this is a challenging task requiring constant adjustments to focus and exposure. Lighting is in overhead fluorescents hidden behind grids. The lighting is adequate, almost too bright. But the backgrounds in the room range from bright white highly reflective walls to a blackboard. The second student monitors sound via a small very old-fashioned audio board that gives a flashing light signal that sound is being received. We have no way of measuring precise levels. The signal from the camera and the audio board then go into a Dell PC (Laptop) and are transmitted via Skype and Netmeeting as per our earlier experience.
d. The signal from China comes in the laptop and then is projected via a digital projector. We have experimented with the placement of the image, sometimes throwing it behind the instructor so that the American students can see the Chinese students, sometime behind the American students so that the American instructor will have a greater awareness of the Chinese class. The latter configuration seems to us to be more useful in reminding the American instructor of her second audience.
e. There are two microphones. One is a wireless one suspended from the ceiling about mid-way in the room. It picks up all the American students and usually the instructor as well. However, the quality of the sound tends to fluctuate widely and we have no good way of controlling input level into the Skype application. The second mic is a hand-held one wired into the audio box. We have no switching mechanism but rapidly plug and unplug the appropriate inputs.
not of April 27: Because of constant sound problems we are now using the on-camera mic on the Sony, which ahs actually worked quite well. We still feel, however, that the ideal solution is going to be a high-quality mic with a narrow field either boom-mounted or "aimed." One phenomemon that we consistently observe is that the more background noice there is in the class, the more the audio trasnmission "loads up" and becomes inaudible. This is not simply a matter of being unable to pick up the instructor from among multiple voices, but the entire sound signal is muddy....
f. As we found in the first class, the quality of sound delivered is all-important. We experienced several problems at the Pacific University end in the first several weeks:
i. Our miking of the classroom was simply inadequate. To catch both the instructor, regardless of whether she stood before the board, at the desk, lectern, or at the transparency projector, was very challenging. A suspended area microphone has been the solution, but we are still operating with somewhat older equipment purchased earlier for different needs than the present ones.
ii. Our instructor, Dr. Anita McClaine, is extremely energetic. She projects very well, but also sometime speaks so rapidly that she overloads either the technology or the aural comprehension of the Chinese students/
iii. We made another critical error. We assumed that because the classroom had a wireless network we could operate wirelessly. We saw this as a partial advantage of being in the classroom as opposed to a lab, and wished to try more creative approaches to the technical challenges facing us. In theory, while we were aware that the wireless net passed data more slowly than a hard-wired Ethernet data connection, it was still much faster than the transmission speed of the Internet itself and should not have presented any bottlenecks.
1. This assumption was incorrect. As has been so often the case, we have found that theoretical assumptions break down quickly in the face of real-world experience. After three frustrating weeks of trying to improve our wireless transmissions, we went back to a hardwired Ethernet connection.

Assessment is being conducted on this class at present and additional reports will soon be posted....

Report from China #1

Jeffrey Barlow, project director, has been in China at Wenzhou Medical College for two weeks.

Ben Young has been with him for five days. All the Apple equipment arrived in good shape and we have had some very good but puzzling results connecting via the borrowed G-4 Powerbook. We have had the following experience:

1) Initial attempt: Friday Dec 31 (all times here are Chinese time; Pac U is Chinese time minus 16 hours) From Cha Shan classroom at Wenzhou Medical College (WMC) (the one we habitually used here in Fall term) to Berglund Center BCIS 8:30 a.m. Chinese time, 3:30 PM PST. Initially unable to establish connection. Then switched to Skype and Netmeeting. This was the window we have always used, and the connection was a good one at both ends which did not require monitoring here. Had a good class of the sort we had with Tim Thompson.

2) Same day, 1: 30 PM from Cha Shan class to Heather Hawkins, who is standing in for Ben as Sys Ops during the two weeks he is in China, at her Forest Grove home; Much better connection, but some audio dropouts from our end. Heather came through loud and clear, beautiful video. Ben and Heather talked for about an hour. This suggests some issue at the Pac U end.

3) Sunday Jan 2, connected from Old Campus Zhuan Jia Lou (Expertís dorm, where Ben and Jeffrey live in downtown Wenzhou. This is an old network and quite a mess, slows down unpredictably, hard hit when Chinese students go on line, etc. The connection is ADSL shared by many, many, others.) to Heather at home, generally good connection but network activity at Chinese end caused packed collisions and loss of data, some dropped connections.

4) Monday Jan 4th 10:23 AM we could not get a connection into BCIS from the Zhuan Jia Lou\r\nAgain suggests some issue at Pac U end.

So far we believe: When we have good conditions the Mac connection is outstanding. Ben and Heather have found the Mac the best way to communicate personally, from the dorm here to her house off-campus. The attraction, of course, is that we get complete sound-video synch unlike skype-netmeeting, and one connection seems less fragile than running two different applications simultaneously. But we do have puzzling results which suggest some bottleneck for the connection at the Pac U end and possibly at the WMC end when trying to connect to Berglund Center at Pac U.

Next procedure: We will try to communicate from Cha Shan to BCIS, hopefully while the good folks at Information Technology are monitoring the network. We will use the Tuesday 9 a.m Chinese time window. This will be 4 pm Pacific time on Monday, January 03, 2005. Perhaps we can determine if this is a router or firewall issue.

Grant received from Apple

We have received a limited use grant of an Apple powerbook with which to test Apple applications such as .mac and IChat av. Because new Apple platforms were not available at WMC, we are taking the "loaner" with us for our teaching in Wenzhou. Ben Young will be present, doing technical support.

Report of October 21-28

Report for Week of October 21-28

We continue to experiment with various applications. The sound quality of SKYPE is so wonderful that it has become our staple application at present. After initial problems, we succeeded in establishing a good video-only link in Microsoft Netmeeting. < http://www.microsoft.com/windows/netmeeting/ >

The combination has worked very well; Wenzhou is receiving both an excellent audio signal and a good video signal, which usually runs smoothly with no freezing of frames. There are, however, some problems. Netmeeting, unlike IVisit, does not give us a real-time statistics window showing the speed of the signals in and out. This is a disadvantage for us, and watching IvisitÌs network stats window often gave us warnings of impending transmission problems. We also miss IVIsit's friendly chat window, it often was the best way for us to communicate. So far we lose video much more than we lose audio, and have never lost both simultaneously. This lets us talk our way through periods of interruption and we can always steer WMC back into Ivisit, which we leave open on our trusty MAC. Another disadvantage is that netmeeting is Windows only and will not run in a Mac environment. This is more of a problem for us than for Wenzhou, as there are almost no Macs on their campus.

Netmeeting, in addition to the good video signal, runs in a wide variety of Window environments and does not seem particularly finicky; it is very robust. However, the quality of the sound is markedly inferior to that of SKYPE, so we continue to run SKYPE on the same machine as Netmeeting. They run comfortably on our older Dell Optiplex (an early Pentium 4 chip from about the year 2000) running Windows XP Pro with 512 MB ram and integrated sound and video cards. In short, not a particularly recent nor powerful machine!

The improved video signal has encouraged us to begin sending the signal from the computer through a digital projector which throws the image on our wall. This lends a greater sense of intimacy and immediacy to the class. We see our end in a smaller frame, and the Chinese classroom in a larger frame on the same image, about 3 x 4 feet in size. Tim Thompson seems to now be lecturing to the class rather than to a computer, and he has a greater sense of having a class present, we think.

We are now also using a small video camera on a tripod with Ben Bagley, our video guy, in attendance. The small PC-type video cameras were just not sharp or rich enough for our needs. The Chinese have made the same decision. In addition, we are now doing a tape of each session at our end, thinking that one day we may want to run sections of classes to other audiences and other than the costs of the tapes there is really no overhead as we need the digital camera present anyway. Only the fact that we have been able to minimize transmission difficulties has made it possible, however, to use the camera. Otherwise, there were just too many of us running around tending machinery, adjusting preferences, etc.

We continue to monitor "weather" on the Internet at < http://weather.uci.edu/> just so we get some sense of what level of packet disruptions might affect our signal. So for "weather" quality has not been a factor at all, so we may well drop this needless complication.

Chinese students are now registering for the BBS on a daily basis and the class activity is going up markedly. See the BBS at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=8 We now have almost 60 posts, each of which is read by multiple students at the Chinese end, and Tim is finding it takes more time to answer the questions, which grow in complexity.

Over the past two weeks we have had a regularly scheduled class twice a week and have had no problems, it has come to seem routine to us.

We do intend to continue to try additional applications so as to receive more experience and information, but we are at a comfortable point where it is difficult to experiment without fear of disrupting the class. As a result, we usually log in 30 minute early or 30 minutes after the class and with a Chinese engineer present at the other end, install new applications and test them out.

We are eager now to move out of this one-to-many environment and into a class-to-class environment in a "real" classroom where we can pay more attention to pedagogy. We are restricted by the fact that only four classes of real interest to Wenzhou are taught in the proper "window" for us, 4 pm to 7 pm PST. In future classes, we would plan the class a year ahead and be sure that selected classes are in the proper time slots.

Report on week of October 11/12 and 14/15

The engineers at Wenzhou Medical College (WMC) split out the audio signal on another application with which they were more familiar than were we: SKYPE found at: http://www.skype.com/ Skype is an internet telephony application. We believe that although audio is more important to them than video in recieving information, the WMC end ran Skype on their regular internet line and video (I-Visit) on their ADSL line as the most efficient allocation of resources.

The results were almost miraculous, on 11/12 we ran SKYPE in a Windows environment and I-VIsit in MAC OS and had excellent audio the entire time. After several weeks of compromised audio, it was really nice to have a super-clean audio signal. We had some initial hiss and network noise, but the engineer at WMC did something to clean it up, and after that it was a beautiful signal with no lags or dropouts. The video, not having the overhead of the audio, was usually much improved as well. We had intermittent problems, but as stated before, when the video lags, all this means is that the images do not update; they do not become unintelligible as is the case with audio with more than 1% dropouts.

We have in the past experienced severe problems on Thur/Fri following about 5:15 PST as, we believe, our students returned to the dorms and accessed the Internet. We again had problems with video, but the SKYPE addition kept the audio running unimpeded.

With the several weeks of successful information transmissions, the Chinese students are beginning to really understand the readings, and if you check the BBS for the class, found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=8&sid=0b9332b72f619374fc366958512158e8 you will see that they are asking some excellent questions.

Tim has found that pausing every 15-20 minutes for questions also elicits some excellent and very sophisticated questions from the Chinese students.

Our next step is to try some additional combined applications such as netmeeting to see if this is a better combined application. We also want to see if we can find some video-only apps as we think that even though we are not using the audio channels in I-Visit there may well be an overhead cost that we are paying that could be slowing down our video. We will report on this in our next update...

Report of Thursday

Today we tried to set up very hurriedly due to our class schedules, and to change a number of variables in software and hardware simultaneously. The end result was very low bandwidth and a marked reduction in our output to WMC. We ran at very low levels, 3-5 KBPS, with the usual result that video died entirely and audio fluctuated badly. WMC actually dropped the video signal out deliberately in hopes of enhancing the audio, but to no avail. After 45 minutes of floundering, we agreed to cut off communications until we get get straight at our end.

The lesson here was that we cannot take this process for granted, the parameters are so narrow that we must pay strict attention to technical issues at all times.

On the other hand, we did manage to convey some information because we had put the intended lecture on the site blog and several of the students read the lecture and have begun posting questions.

This shows the importance of having multiple levels of techniques for conveying information or content ready at all times...

Another element of this class was to serve an audio clip to the Chinese to download at their end as part of the lesson. But because our bandwidth was so cramped, we think they got only part of it, we will find out on Monday the 11th.

Jeffrey Barlow

An evaluation from Yang in Wenzhou

Dear Tim,

Thank you for helping our students learn American literature . The methodology you adopt for this class is excellent in that, after a brief summary of the materials required of the students to read beforehand, youÌre trying to tackle the difficult points and offer some time for students to ask questions of having a few minutes panel discussion. In fact, this way of teaching has created a student-centered class, with the aim to cultivate the students' abilities to study, analyze and reason by themselves. To meet the requirements of this class, students will have to read more, which is conducive to the development of their abilities to acquire knowledge, do research and think independently. This interactive class, I'm sure, will encourage students to participate in the whole process of learning actively and to the maximum degree, as you do now and will continue to use the teaching methods to elicit answers or provoke students to discuss with each other, find the problems and try to solve them and do research by themselves. With time on, with the improvement of the pictures and sound and, especially, with the easy access for the students to the Internet, I am sure they will benefit more and they can also cultivate their ability to seek information on the Internet.

Test of Sept 28

TIPIC Report as of test of 9/28

At WMC they continue to upgrade their system and their procedures.  At present they have broken out audio and video signals and are using two different I-Visit licenses, sending audio via their regular Internet lines on 1, and video via the ADSL line on the other. This seems to really be having a strong effect. We were using this time for planning syllabus, reconciling vacation times, etc., and it was a truly normal interchange.

Lessons from this session:

• WMC end has apparently handled all the problems caused by load at their end, the engineer is really on the job there and making many good suggestions.
• It should be noted that the “weather on the Internet” was not in fact that stable, there were many servers down and yet we had no problem.
• Time to start working on quality of sound and picture, we have the speeds, can now begin tweaking set ups at our end to see how much quality we can get out?

   

  Posted by: Jeffrey Barlow on Sep 30, 04 | 2:08 pm

TIPIC Report as of Class of 9/27

This class was done with new facilities at the WMC end.  They have added an ADSL line into the classroom and  provided an on-site engineer to help with set-up and tweaking during the tests.  As a result, this was an excellent session.  Things went so well that we really began to log infrequently as were not experiencing the swings in bandwidth as in earlier tests.  This session was really a class,.  We had several young English teachers participating, plus Professor Yang.  It became, for the first time, a really normal interchange. It was possible to forget about the technology for long periods and simply work together. Tim Thompson was excellent and the Chinese students responded well.

Lessons from this session:

• Chinese ADSL is a great addition, they are much faster and less sensitive to loading in the usage patterns at their end. We did see dips as usage went up at their end between 8 amd 9 am, but it was always bearable and our bandwidth into them stayed more than high enough.  Our goal is a stable 80 KBPS out, and this was close…
• We are almost there…

Report of September 27 on 9.23 testing

On the 23rd we worked from the Berglund Center lab with the classroom in China. The engineers at Wenzhou were still working on the connections there. Our overall experience was a very positive one. Tim Thompson presented material on the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era in American literature. The connection was a good one up to China, less satisfactory down to Pacific University. But we experienced wild swings in bandwidth and cannot be sure as to what caused them.

A useful session. Once our campus I.T. opened up bandwidth for us, we were fine. But the drops in our bandwidth before then remain unexplained. May be due to problems on the Internet itself, but we cannot yet trace our signal directly to China, so cannot be sure.

Again, we learned a number of important lessons:

1) *** The site http://weather.uci.edu/ “UCI Internet Weather Report” which we are only beginning to learn to use, indicated a great deal of traffic problems on the Internet during our test session. The stats in our internal system at Pac U do not show a local bandwidth problem. But our I.T. Director, Lee Colaw, gives us more bandwidth and the problem quickly goes away. Cause and effect still not clear to us, we are analyzing stats now.

2) We resolve to try to learn to check paths end to end so as to better be able to understand variables, Will call folks at “Internet Weather Report.”

3) We have to find out why our signal fluctuated so today. Cannot sustain these uncertainties.

4) Experience once again confirms two important earlier conclusions:

A. 35KBPS out is threshold for adequate video and audio. Must not go below this. We hope to establish a floor of 80 KBPS out.

B. Audio is more important than video at the Chinese class end. Students will take notes and comprehend audio and find the video relatively unimportant. But for us, we like to have some video that shows the state of the Chinese classroom.