Real-time project for students

Students from Kristin School in Auckland, attended the Independent Schools New Zealand (ISNZ) Conference 2009 in Wellington earlier this month; only minutes later, these same students were taking part in a task in a room at Kristin School.

The students had been participating in a video conference connected to the Wellington ISNZ event.

Kristin head girl Elizabeth Mittiga invited other Independent Schools to join her group, and on the day, Kristin welcomed Seo-Jin Jeong and Alex Campbell from ACG Senior College, Abbey Walsh from Saint Kentigern College and Nick Walsh and Jenna Butler from Pinehurst School to be a part of the project.

At the same time, three other Independent Schools from around the country were connecting to the conference: Southwell School in the Waikato, Wellington’s Scots College and Christ’s College in Christchurch.

The video link connected them all to the Duxton Hotel in Wellington where Prof. Martin Westwell was giving a keynote address to the Association of Heads of Independent Schools.

Prof. Westwell spoke about the changes to the brain and thinking that may be resulting from increased usage of digital technologies.

He then directed his address to the students who were listening in. He challenged the belief that young people today are better able to multi-task as a result of having grown up with multiple digital stimuli such as TV, iPods and the internet. A task was then set for the students to complete.

For the next two days, students were to select random participants for a multi­-
tasking experiment. The data which they collected was loaded onto an on-line spreadsheet which automatically updated their collective results.

Two days later, they returned to their groups to present the information they had gathered. This time, the technology was stretched even further, with Prof. Westwell now participating in the video conference from Australia.

Each group delivered a prepared statement and discussed their results with the Prof. while the video conference was live at the closing address of the ISNZ event.

“This project was a successful experiment in collaborative research and an opportunity to showcase recent advances in communication technologies that exist in our schools. The KAREN network provided a flawless framework to communicate with each other,” says Andrew Churches, the Kristin teacher who facilitated the North Shore group.

“The students enjoyed the unique opportunity to work with the other Independent School students from around the country, as well as the insight they gained from conducting the multitasking experiment.

“I suspect a few of them will be removing some ‘distractions’ from their environment, the next time they sit down to study.”

The video conference itself, was accomplished with the help of the high speed NZ-wide fibre-optic network called the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network, also known as KAREN.

The KAREN network connects research and educational institutions, such as universities and schools.

The video conference unit uses the KAREN network to connect to the KAREN video conference bridge, which is specifically set up for video conferences.

It can connect to the bridge with very low latency, that is, the bridge receives the data within 10 milliseconds of sending.

Each video conference unit at each school, connected to the bridge, which allowed all the participants to see and talk to each other.