We are now just about four weeks into the course, and though we have had some difficulties, such as this week's snow that stopped the heartbeat in London, and some intital pressure on getting the hardware up and running, I think we can comfortably say that we are having a good deal of fun engaging in these trans-national seminar sessions.
Initially, well I guess still, I feel like an old man shouting on a mobile phone in a public space when speaking in the videoconference seminar - which is, of course, not necessary, since both the video and audio goes through very well. I guess it just takes some time getting used to. One of the UCL students noticed one thing that makes a videoconference seminar different from a regular seminar, apart from the obvious fact of us only virtually being in the same room, that we seem to formulate ourselves more carefully when speaking "through the wall" - we noticed that the individual contributions are very thougtful and more consciously responsive when doing a seminar this way. I had not thought about this, but I think it actually hightens the level of reflection and active contributions to the seminar sessions.
The best thing about the course is, I think, that we have an excellent group of students with just about 6 UCL students and 3 Danish students. Most of the UCL students are volunteers and are only auditing the course which doesn't leave them enough time to engage as actively in our students led group work sessions during the week as they would have liked, but here, fortunately, the Danish students are extremely active and make good use of the Moodle site we have created for the course. Read more about our Moodle site elsewhere on the blog. You can also see a photo taken by David of our videoconference setup seen from London. I wonder how it looks from the Danish side?
As you can see in Davids photo, we have set up our tables in a regular seminar fashion with a wideangle camera in front of us and a multi-directional microphone on the table. On the screen to the left we have an image of the Danish seminar room, and to the right we have an interactive whiteboard where we share a screen (using a NetMeeting application that allows us to shift control of the board). In the photo we can see ourselves on the whiteboard, but in the seminars we have our Moodle site there, a powerpoint, pictures, pdf files of texts or websites that we are discussing in the seminar. We still need the assistance of our technician in Aarhus, Michael, to set up the communication, but it looks really intuitive and I think we, Svend Erik and I, could manage all of the tech ourselves. I'll try to get more photos of our setup and some more precise technical stuff up on the blog soon.
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