Using Technology to Access a World of Speakers for Chapter Meetings Joseph Kasser,
[email protected] It seems that many INCOSE members who find themselves faced with the task of organising programs for their chapters, end up working in isolation, and eventually giving up in frustration. However, my research and experience has shown that technology can provide a solution to the problem and provide world-class speakers at little cost and not much more effort. This is because most presentations, be they at chapter meetings or conferences follow the same format or process: 1. 2. 3. 4.
The host introduces the speaker. The speaker gives the presentation. A discussion takes place between the speaker and the audience. The host and audience thank the speaker.
As long as no one interrupts the speaker during the talk, we can ask, does the speaker actually need to be in the room? I have researched this problem since 1998 and the answer seems to be no, not if the host group uses appropriate technology. The possibilities of remote presentations open the door for chapters to host speakers from anywhere in the world. What, then, is the appropriate technology? As a systems engineer, I must say that this is a very difficult question to answer in general, since we have not yet defined the requirements for the situation; but I have documented several approaches that can help chapters host speakers remotely, including those described below. Each of them has worked for me, allowing the provision of an interesting talk to an audience geographically separated from the speaker. In May 1999, I watched Doug Vogel of City University of Hong Kong, make a live presentation from Hong Kong to an audience in Virginia Beach, Virginia, at the Fourth Annual Intelligence Community Desktop Collaboration Conference and Exposition ; he used PowerPoint for the slides and Microsoft NetMeeting software). One screen in the conference room showed the PowerPoint slides for the presentation, which were controlled in the conference room by the session chair. A second screen showed a small “talking head” image of the presenter, which was updated about once a second. Unfortunately there was not much movement for the audience to see, so the image seemed to be more distracting than helpful. The talking head screen also showed a text window in which someone on the receiving end in Virginia could type questions back to the presenter, but only the session chair could type into the communications link. While there were several noticeable interference hits on the presenter’s voice during the presentation, the link was reasonably clear, and there was little difference between that technology-enhanced presentation and a conventional presentation. During the INCOSE International Symposium in Brighton, U.K., in 1999, I made a presentation to a panel forum from my desk at University of Maryland University College (UMUC), located about twenty miles from the White House in Washington, DC. I recorded my presentation before the symposium, put it on a CD-ROM, and sent it to the session chair before the event; he then played the presentation from a computer in the session room. As the presentation was in progress, I connected to the session room via the Internet using Voiceover-the-Internet (VOIP) software. I was able to hear the last ten minutes of my pre-recorded, asynchronous presentation, and then take part in the live, synchronous question-and-answer session. To my ear, the quality of the audio was as good as that of a telephone. Since the software had a text-mode link in parallel with the audio link, I could also exchange text messages with the session chair while my own recorded talk was in progress.
The Systems Engineering, Test and Evaluation 2000 conference in Brisbane, Australia, provided an opportunity for a distance-mode session of three presentations. None of the presenters were in the session room in person; two were in the United States and one was some distance away but still in Australia. As in the previous example, each of the presenters had recorded their presentations in Realmedia™ format as an RM file before the conference and e-mailed the recordings to the session chair. The chair then introduced each presentation and played the file. Each presenter then telephoned into the session room about five minutes before their presentation was scheduled to finish, waited while the presentation finished, and then took part in the question-and-answer session in real time. The questions from the audience were repeated into the telephone by the session chair, and the presenter’s responses were transmitted back to the room simply by placing the radio microphone provided by the conference audio-visual facility next to the telephone earpiece. Derek Hitchins gave a keynote presentation at the SETE 2002 conference in Sydney Australia from his home in Salisbury, England. He pre-recorded the audio portion of the presentation as .wav files and attached these to his PowerPoint presentation. The session chair conducted the question-and-answer session at the end of the talk by relaying the audience’s questions to the presenter via mobile-phone link from the platform. The audience members were able to hear the speaker’s response when the session chair placed the microphone next to the phone’s earpiece. Derek Hitchins also gave a presentation at the Conference on Systems Engineering Research in New Jersey in 2005, even though he was at home in the U.K. at the time. The talk was sandwiched between two other live talks coming just after a short break for tea or coffee. During the break, the session chair telephoned the presenter and set up the audio so that the phone was connected to the room’s sound system. The presenter gave the talk in real time while the session chair advanced the PowerPoint slides as instructed. After the presentation there was a short discussion, the session chair thanked the presenter, the audience clapped the session chair disconnected the phone call and introduced the next speaker. The audience didn’t seem to think anything out of the ordinary had happened. I have gotten a similar response to my own use of remote technology in the classroom at UMUC. When I permitted my students to use the asynchronous presentation technology and asked the class afterward what they thought about it, the students made two recurring comments. First, they couldn’t interrupt the speaker which may not be a bad thing. Second, they found that the technology removed the element of stage fright from the classroom presentation. I gave a presentation at a workshop in Tokyo from my home in Adelaide, Australia in 2006. A week before the workshop I sent the host the PowerPoint slides and a reasonableresolution video of myself in AVI format via the postal system. The discussion after the presentation was held using Skype VOIP. Even with the dial-up connection at the presenter’s end, the audio quality was sufficient for understanding. In 2008 and 2009 I gave a Leverhulme Lecture presentation to seven different U.S. Chapters at different times from my home in Cranfield in the U.K., using a combination of Skype, Webex, the telephone, and Liveclassrom. One of those lectures was simulcast to several locations in the U.S. In other cases I have also used MP3-format audio files to accompany distance-education lectures, and this simple technology coupled with a few “tricks” such as placing the speaker’s picture on the introductory slide, can provide distance-mode asynchronous presentations in any situation where the speaker and audiences are geographically separated. Distance is no longer an excuse for not having world-class presenters at chapter meetings. Further details of the simple technology can be found on my Web site at http://therightrequirement.com/; click on the two links in the “Distance Mode Talks” section. I have several recent recorded presentations that I am willing to give remotely and in person if
the travel expenses are taken care of and I would invite interested program chairs to contact me and participate in further experiments to provide their members with an unusual and hopefully interesting experience.
