Virtual Museum Visits
Here’s another article about videoconference-based museum visits. I found a couple of things interesting in the story. First, I like the fact that the “virtual visit” is combined with hands-on activities, with items being shipped out to the students before the program happens. Second, there was an interesting contrast between how North Carolina and Washington state installed educational videoconferencing. Washington funded the installation of videoconference systems in every district in the state, but most of these systems wound up in the administrative buildings in the districts and end up being primarily used for meetings. North Carolina, however, apparently focused on creating “cyberclassrooms,” which even in the naming of them made clear the purpose of the facilities.
When I worked in the outreach program at the Pacific Science Center, we sent teams of teachers in vans all across the state, reaching students in every one of the 39 counties. I always thought it would be really cool to do some form of follow-up visit to the students through a video link-up. Now here we are, twelve years later, and the technology is finally almost there. The last impediment is the data connection between the school and the district headquarters - most in-district networks don’t have the capacity to handle the amount of data that videoconferencing provides. But with WiMax, we may solve that problem, too!