February 15, 2007
Marratech saves 18.900 kg of green house gases
Boras Tidning (in Swedish), writes the Sodra Alvsborg Sjukhus (SAS) that 294 e-meetings where held in 2006. This translates into 2764 less trips and into 18 900 kg in green house gases.
Marratech is installed and in use at SÄS, making us proud to be a contributing factor in helping them reach their environmental goals for 2006 and the future.
Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2006
Telework Consortium Blog
We have had the Telework Consortium as users / customers / partners for a long time now! I recommend reading their blog!
Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 03:28 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2006
Marratech in the Times
Marratech has been mentioned in the Times' Higher Education Supplement. Here is an excerpt, about how the university is organizing a large socio-economic forum using Marratech:
Delegates will gather at university "hubs" across the world to view speakers on big screens - 36 are so far expected in Manchester and about 50 in Tallinn, Estonia, as well as groups in up to 15 other venues linked to the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), from San Diego, California, to Zhejiang in China. But others will also be able to watch proceedings from laptops on their kitchen tables and even interrupt, so long as they have a microphone. This will be made possible through a combination of access-grid technology and video conferencing in the university hubs and Marratech technology for desktops.
Full article follows:
Meeting of young minds in the cities of cyberspace'
Times Higher Education Supplement (posted here with permission)
27 October 2006
An e-conference unites postgraduate geographers from around the globe, reports Harriet Swain
Our monthly guide to some of the conferences taking place around the world.
What better venue in which to discuss urban life and locations in today's world than somewhere that transcends both time and place - cyberspace?
This idea will be put to the test next month at a three-day e-conference, Researching Contemporary Cities, organised by postgraduates for postgraduates, with the support of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), an international alliance of higher education institutions committed to establishing collaborations.
The conference, which covers aspects of political and economic restructuring in cities from post-Olympic Athens to the regeneration of Cork and Limerick, and from regulation of erotic labour to political legitimacy in post-apartheid South Africa, will take place on successive Thursdays. It kicks off each day at 4pm UK time to fit in with different time zones.
Delegates will gather at university "hubs" across the world to view speakers on big screens - 36 are so far expected in Manchester and about 50 in Tallinn, Estonia, as well as groups in up to 15 other venues linked to the WUN, from San Diego, California, to Zhejiang in China. But others will also be able to watch proceedings from laptops on their kitchen tables and even interrupt, so long as they have a microphone. This will be made possible through a combination of access-grid technology and video conferencing in the university hubs and Marratech technology for desktops.
Speakers will make their papers available online before the conference, delegates will be able to access videos of the conference proceedings after the event and a conference website noticeboard will allow discussions to continue.
Attendance is free but, with no hotel rooms or flights to book, organisers do not know how many participants to expect, although they have asked people to send an e-mail to let them know they intend to drop in.
Ross Jones, one of the conference organisers, says there is an element of trust involved in organising an e-conference, since you cannot simply bundle people out of the room or switch off their microphones if they interrupt once too often. "It could be an issue for the future if e-conferences become more popular," he says. "At the moment, people who know about a conference tend to be those who are interested and wouldn't want to be disruptive."
E-conferences have been around in different forms for a number of years, but underdeveloped technology has generally made them risky events to hold, and relatively basic. With technology improving all the time and concerns about the impact of air travel on climate change moving up the agenda, they are becoming more important features of academic life, according to Dee Gilmore-Steward, WUN manager in Manchester.
They are also particularly suited to postgraduates, says David Pilsbury, WUN chief executive. This is, first, because they are cheap - significant when most university budgets for postgraduate travel are tight or non-existent.
Pilsbury also argues that it is particularly important for postgraduates to become involved in global networks early "when they are developing a sense of themselves in a globalised world".
In addition, e-conferences offer the possibility for postgraduates to
disseminate their ideas and hear the ideas of other young scholars
withoutbeing shouted down by more senior academics. The WUN regularly holds virtual seminars on topics ranging from earth systems to multilingualism in the Middle Ages, but these follow a traditional format of main speaker and questions from students. Feedback suggests what e-delegates really value is hearing questions from their equivalents in different parts of the world.
Pilsbury suggests this democratisation and opening up of academic communities is the result of the growing redundancy of gatekeepers in many fields, thanks to the worldwide web. "Peer-to-peer interaction is part of the 21st-century way of doing things," he says.
He sees postgraduate e-conferences as academic extensions of social networking sites such as UniVillage or MySpace.
This is demonstrated by the origins of the Researching Contemporary Cities conference. The idea came from postgraduates who had returned from a trip to the US and wanted to continue the academic dialogue they had started with peers in American universities.
A follow-up face-to-face event will take place at the Association of American Geographers' annual conference in San Francisco next April, but if November's e-conference is a success the online format is likely to be repeated in other subject disciplines, says Gilmore-Stewart.
The Researching Contemporary Cities postgraduate e-conference takes place on November 2, 9 and 16.
Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2006
LTU Marratech rooms
Yesterday was a revelation.
Peter Parnes showed us the Marratech enabled auditoriums and classrooms at the Lulea Technical University.
My jaw just dropped.
I do not know how to best describe it, other than to describe it via bullets.
- Every room has a raised floor for cables
- Every room is acoustically treated.
- Every table has a shielded, button enabled speaker microphone.
- A motion detector rail in the ceiling feels where the presenter is, making the camera follow the presenter automatically.
- A document camera, hidden in the ceiling, can be used to show documents.
- When a classroom attendee uses one of the table microphones, the main camera automatically focuses on the person talking.
- Every room has a computer dedicated for the teacher / presenter slide and document camera while the room has it's own computer for ensuring the video and audio from the room never gets interrupted.
- The first table in the class room has a plasma screen facing toward the teacher, so he / she do not need to turn around to view the material.
- 4 quiet projectors show the video from the network, the whiteboard, the document camera, etc... Controlled by the teacher.
- All is controlled from a profile based touch screen system. So a teacher's profile is kept and activated when he / she logs in.
- Power and network for all the attendees and the presenter built into the tables.
- 6 such rooms are now being used, ranging from a small room to large auditoriums. Projectors are swapped for very large plasma screens in the smaller rooms.
- All turned off or on by a button.
- All the rooms are controlled and assisted from a central control station where the Marratech client software is installed, the client computer sending all the video and audio from the classroom is controlled from there. (Long analog connections from the classroom to the computer)
- more more more...
In the 10 years I have worked with this stuff, I have seen many attempts at building such rooms, always OK, but never lived up to the possibilities of our software. It was always a set of compromises that left a lot to be desired. Less a question of effort and more a question of what was possible technically.
The setup being used beats the best VC enabled rooms to the ground. I have not been this surprised for a long time. The best part is, the system just worked. It was simple to use, it just worked.
I lift my hat very high to everyone (companies, individuals) involved in this. What an accomplishement!
I hope to be able to post pictures and a small video clip in the coming weeks and more details.
Ten years ago, I left Canada for the Lulea University because of how truly ahead this university was in terms of technology adoption, the quality of teaching and the absence of heavy tradition that impedes innovation. Yesterday, it confirmed to me that it still is the case.
Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 06:21 AM | Comments (2)
October 06, 2006
Big news: Marratech Glows in Scotland
Just wanted to get your attention towards a major Marratech deployment taking place. Marratech will be powering Scotland's Glow project (formerly SSDN). The Guardian, a major UK newspaper, reports on the project here, it gives a good background into the project.
Thanks to the Marratech Manager J2EE API and some specific H.323 video conferencing development work (E.164 and E.164 dial in), Marratech is now being deployed for e-learning across the Glow network, accessible to 800 000 students and teachers in 2008.
Posted by Serge Lachapelle at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)