Control Freak

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Presentation Systems

Control Freak

6/1/2007

By John K. Waters

Got interactive whiteboards and control podia? Watch out: They're about to become obsolete. Here's the inside track on the new super-interactive electronic boards and New Age presentation podia --the ultimate in AV/IT control.

Control Freak THE HOTTEST TECHNOLOGY trends in higher ed today can be boiled down to two roughly converse capabilities: the delivery of time- and space-shifted instruction to individual students (think podcasts), and the coordination of disparate-source content within the classroom, for enriched group experiences. The first is taking advantage of existing, mostly consumer-oriented platforms such as iPods, web browsers, and PDAs. But the second is driving innovation in two distinct product categories--electronic whiteboards and audio-visual (AV) control systems--whose feature sets are growing, and even beginning to overlap.

"College classrooms have undergone great changes because of computers and the internet," says Randal Lemke, executive director of InfoComm International, the nonprofit association of the AV communications industry. "They now have an amazing array of resources available from the web, content servers, DVDs, and other media, and even other classrooms. But you have to be able to display all of that; manage and interact with it. There's a real need to pull it all together, and that's making higher education the second largest vertical market in our association."

Control Freak According to a November 2005 InfoComm study, colleges and universities increasingly see classroom tech as an investment rather than an expense, because of its ability to attract students. Highlighting that growing understanding of classroom tech as competitive edge, the rate at which colleges and universities outfitted their classrooms with AV systems doubled between 2000 and 2005, the study found. InfoComm expects that growth to continue at a rate of 25 to 30 percent per year until at least the year 2010. (The association is set to offer updated statistics at the upcoming InfoComm '07 trade show, June 15-21 in Anaheim, CA.)

Those statistics don't surprise K. Watson Harris, director of academic technology planning and projects at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. "Both students and parents expect the latest technology to be there," she says. "Not only do the students use it to learn the course material, but they gain valuable, marketable skills in the technology itself--in high-end presentation tools, collaborative multimedia interaction, and podcast creation-- and they even gain some experience through simulated case studies and serious games. A couple of projectors and a PowerPoint presentation won't cut it today."