I know, you are thinking: Twitter? Isn’t that where millions of people drone on incessantly, generating inane streams of completely irrelevant information, all of it in obnoxious 140 character bursts? Well, yes, but only most of it is like that.

There are some very smart people on Twitter, and if you find them – and follow them – you can learn a lot. You don’t need to say anything. And you can follow or unfollow anyone at any time.

The first thing you really need (after an account) is a “Twitter client.” The actual Twitter interface page, in a word, sucks. (Ah, see, the sort of detailed and insightful technical perspective you have come to expect here at AV-1.)

There are a number of fine ones out there, I happen to use and like TweetDeck. Aside from just being a much nicer interface with which to follow others, they really simplify your ability to follow “hashtags.”

Twitter “handles” begin with “@” – I am @AVGreg for example. Twitter hashtags begin with “#” and are how Twitter allows users to create groups around a common interest. If you tweet and include a hashtag everyone following that hashtag sees that tweet. In a Twitter client like TweetDeck you can add these hashtag groups and they just appear in new vertical columns.

That brings me to my whole point tonight. (I know, about time.) There is usually an AV Chat at “#avchat” (Go figure huh?) every Thursday at noon Pacific Time. This week the topic is classroom technology – the common thread most of us share.

If you tweet – or have just been thinking about it – jump in and check it out. Come spend some time with your AVTweeps.

http://www.commercialintegrator.com/article/crestron_demos_microsoft_kinect_gesture_control

Cool huh? Sure it’s pretty basic, but could this be the predecessor of our future control systems? It is Crestron dabbling in this after all; I don’t think that’s insignificant.

One advantage I have heard mentioned is no more gunky touch screens. (Do you really have people who clean them periodically?)

A gesture based system may allow for control from a wider range of locations. I am assuming, like mine, your faculty relate to AV control locations the way cats relate to patio doors: the other side would be better.

Many of us have wondered where touch-sensitive monitors are going. Are they going to take over for interactive whiteboards and give us something easier to integrate into an auditorium? If gesture control develops fast enough could it steal some of that thunder and let us turn any image into an interactive whiteboard? I think that level of annotation and interaction, coupled with the ability to wander around the teaching area, might just be the “killer app.”

Voice control? I don’t know. Siri seems to be having quite a bit of trouble with accents. I’m sure the algorithms will get better, but most of our campuses are quite the eclectic mix of nationalities. I can’t help but think we will be a difficult application to master. Besides, how much error-free consistency do you want to see in a control system before you install it in a room? With voice control the first one they yell at is the system, and you know who the second is….

I think it’s intriguing. I think it’s something we are going to see more of. I think it has some great potential. What do you think? Is this the (ahem) wave of the future.

I know, I know, you are probably thinking: “Ooooooh, he works at UCLA!” I wish I could say the work lived up to the mystique, but our primary responsibility is AV in the classrooms. Most of them are decidedly more functional and utilitarian than anything else. With our limited campus space, plus the state budget being what it is out here, large building projects involving classrooms and fancy AV system design have been rather rare.

In fact we will only now hit 100% – 196 rooms – with full AV systems this summer if everything goes as planned. We have been trying to add 6 rooms a quarter the last few years, doing all the work here in-house.

As soon as I figure out how to do it, I hope to begin linking to and commenting on articles I come across. I read a lot. It’s how I try to keep up with this little corner of the madly spinning AV world that we call home.

As always, your comments are welcomed and encouraged. This is a participatory environment. Just remember – if it’s not yet blindingly obvious – we are not professional writers. We do what you do. Most of us work somewhere in the higher-ed AV world. We are fellow geeky tech nerds. Most of us still have more VCRs and videotapes in our rooms than we would ever care to admit to in polite AV company. Besides, we’re volunteers. We are doing this purely for the fame and glory. (Note to self: review life choices.)

So welcome to these odd new little corners of the AV-1 site – windows into our respective AV psyches. I anticipate this one will be a bit eclectic and disorganized, but always interesting and good for a little fun – just like a good garage or basement.

On Wednesday, March 7th at 11:00 a.m. EST, the Association for Quality in Audio Visual Technology will provide a free webinar entitled, What is AV9000 and How Do I Apply Quality Assurance in AV Technology? Led by Mario Maltese, CTS-D, CTS-I, CQT, the session will discuss Quality Assurance as a formal discipline, Cisco’s adoption of the AV9000 Standard, and the benefits of embedding AV9000 language into RFPs.

A Q&A session will follow the presentation.

“The stakes are higher,” says Mario Maltese, “AV Technology now demands in excess of 10% of a capital budget, but the costs for poor quality can be as high as 20% of that. How does one assure that the next AV system you procure does not result in a disaster?”

For more than three decades, Mario Maltese has been at the forefront of high-profile audio visual projects in the New York Tri-state area. A recipient of InfoCOMM’s prestigious Educator of the Year award and Fred Dixon Service in Education award, his portfolio includes sound systems for the New York State Assembly and the New York Stock Exchange’s Trading Floor.

What’s your experience with quality control and meeting project expectations? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

More than 120 technology managers and directors responded to our questions about prevailing issues that affect the choices we make when planning to bring new learning spaces online. All respondents were directly involved in some aspect of learning space development (i.e. planning, design, procurement, project management, quality control, installation). As evidence of AV-1’s commitment to keeping surveys brief, the majority completed the survey in less than ten minutes.

What follows is our analysis of five key elements explored in the survey.

NUMBER OF ROOMS for each range of per-room equipment costs

The second question asked how many room-projects each of us is involved in this year (2011) as a function of their total equipment value.

I was surprised by the sheer volume of projects. For 2011 survey respondents will be involved in projects that include more than 2500 rooms cumulatively, with greater than $50M in total equipment value. That’s an average of 89 rooms a year. We are clearly part of a very prolific little corner of the audiovisual world.

Our work, however, does skew a bit towards smaller projects. About 60% of the rooms have a total value of $25K or less. Just over a quarter of our room-projects were valued at $10K or less.

Meanwhile, projects over $50K in value will only make up a paltry 16% of our involvement.

I know here at UCLA a high percentage of my projects end up in these lower categories also, doing quite a few incremental upgrades in the typical year. We choose more frequent small upgrade over fewer big upgrades. We find that it helps keep our systems a bit more uniform across campus. The smaller projects are also easier to schedule in between the classes that we typically dodge for all but a few weeks throughout the year.

The high number of small projects, however, raises some questions….

• Do you also reside in this world of incremental upgrades? (At UCLA, we call it “bridge painting.”)
• Are you regularly building out complete, new systems for those smaller dollar amounts?
• Do you use one of the many “packaged” systems out there where many of the core AV system components come pre-kitted and ready to “drop in”?
• Is it possible that the proliferation of these turn-key packages that we’ve seen in the last few years may be facilitating many of these smaller projects?

What PERCENTAGE are these projects of ALL learning space projects at your institution’s location?

With 80% of us being involved in all – or the majority – of classroom technology projects, we are clearly the go-to folks for learning technology at our respective institutions.

How has the QUANTITY of project-rooms that you have been directly involved in (i.e. your project workload) been trending from year to year?

This question revealed a surprising trend: almost 50% of the respondents are seeing our project workload increase, despite many of our budgets getting cut. This is good news certainly, but still perhaps a bit surprising given the state of the economy.
What could be behind this trend?

• Is our workload going up as we are roll out technology to additional, previously untouched spaces?
• Is our refit activity just catching up with us our systems age?
• Are we actually moving work in-house that was previously farmed out to integration firms and consultants?

What do you see as the SINGLE BIGGEST OBSTACLE for increasing your involvement in learning space projects at your institution’s location?

To no one’s surprise, more than 50% of us said that budgetary issues are our biggest obstacle to getting involved in more projects.

While there is no magic formula to bringing in more money or people, would it be beneficial to explore ways to leverage our existing dollars and personnel?  I’m wondering, given the state of the economy and the various budget histrionics many of us have had to endure, if some of us have had to learn some new tricks to eke out the most bang for our limited buck. These were the choices:

1. Budgetary. My department has insufficient resources (funds or personnel) to contribute these in-house services more broadly.
2. Knowledge. Our skill set is insufficient to do the work.
3. Competition. Other in-house service units dominate this market. [no one selected this cause]
4. Political. There are dark forces plotting against us, thwarting our every move.
5. Choice. Why bother when we can farm it out to contractors.
6. The “other” option included some interesting comments….
• “Educating folks on campus that our department can assist them and make the project better than if they try to do it on their own, or trust that it is just going to work right.”
• “Properly managing outsourced suppliers.”
• “Time: Since we don’t do installs every day we are not as fast as the contractors we use.”
• “[Campus] ignorance of what we do.”
• “[None.] We are totally involved.”
• “Unwillingness of administration to see that installed technology requires staff to support it.”
• “Staff preparedness to embrace.”
• “[Lack of] knowledge of contemporary learning space design.”
• “Budgetary but not our budget — those of the different departments we service.”

Chime in now!

Again, thank you for participating in this effort by sharing your thoughtful survey responses. I think that, when a larger number of people participate in AV-1 surveys, we can infer with greater confidence the commonality of experience across our community.  Now it’s your turn, once again: Tell us what you think. Chime in below and on the AV-1 list…

• Do these results reflect what you have experienced?
• Are there additional points that have been overlooked?

Greg Brown, CTS-D
UCLA

This is important stuff. Networked control systems can do much more than just dim the lights and raise the volume, all current systems provide hooks to a database in which every button-push and device-selection is recorded and time-stamped. Furthermore, graphic touch panels offer the added benefit of serving as real-time trouble-shooting tools that can minimize session interruptions and empower users to “fix the glitch” before it turns into everyone’s problem.

Lesson One: Harness your data and make it work for you

No helpdesk operation is immune to the errant user who fires off a hostile tale of woe to the boss in the corner office. Perhaps they woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Or maybe it was just one of those days when, despite best intentions, things go horribly awry. We all have those days.

But from the big boss’s perspective, he imagined that you had everything under control… and now THIS changes everything.

Tiner notes that, while this certainly is a critical time for data (remember that “data” is represented in the “I” of “IT”), the best time for data would have been a year earlier. At that time, free of the taint of grumpy users demanding someone’s head on a stick, the savvy technology director could have begun to brief the administration on the nature of learning technology support.

So, although the help desk fielded 64 trouble tickets in Fall 2010, that represents a failure rate of about 1% when aggregated across 5865 total events… A 99% success rate!

When coupled with trends that show improved service over time, that’s powerful stuff.

Lesson Two: Success is more than finding and fixing the problem, it’s about helping users forget they even had a technical difficulty

The latter opportunity is crucial to successful customer support. At Bates College, an outbound technician must travel across campus to the classroom before taking the time to evaluate the problem and render a solution. Scott’s team implemented a robust library of self-help pages that the user could access right from the touch panel.

Service data indicated that 15% of the time, the instructor had already resolved the problem by the time the technician arrived, nonetheless, the ordeal of poking buttons and rebooting machines left a bad taste in their mouths.

With that, Tiner’s group set the goal of decreasing the amount of time it took to resolve common problems. On closer inspection, the data revealed one of the most common problems was the lack of a laptop video signal (aka the notorious “Fn-F8″ problem). His programmers set to work adjusting the controls to check for a video signal when the “Display Laptop” button was pressed. If the system finds no sync signal, the touch panel displays a self-help prompt for the user to try two easy steps (one of which will usually do the trick) and the on-screen message disappears when system detect video sync.

And the outcomes? Tiner reports that users are engaged in the solution and, consequently, they never perceive that they have a technical difficulty. Instead, the instructor finishes class having a completely positive technical experience. Furthermore, manpower is conserved (30-45 minutes saved per incident) by eliminating the need to dispatch outbound technicians. Bravo!

Scott Tiner is the chairman of InfoCOMM’s Technology Managers Council and a regular contributor on AV-1. Take in Scott’s webinar here (contact info required) and share your thoughts below and on the AV-1 list.

While this is by no means an exhaustive report, we hope that you find these views useful to your due diligence and decision-making.

[Editor's note: Interviews are provided for informational purposes and should not be construed as an endorsement. Neither AV-1, nor the author have received any form of compensation in exchange for these posts.]

This list is shown in last-in-first-out (LIFO) order. In the coming weeks, additional interviews and articles will be posted to the top of this list.

Table of Contents

Mark Valenti, The Sextant Group, discusses the up-side of a down economy as an inspiration for outside-the-box tech planning.

Ernie Bailey, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, speaks about the importance of cross-training to get the best out of AV and IT support staff.

 
Jody Forehand, Luidia, on the cost-effective approach of adding components as-needed.

Jackie Deluna, AMX on the importance of social proof for mission-critical technologies.

John Heffelfinger, Crestron, on the value of end-to-end technology solutions. 

Andrew Edwards, President of Extron, on the zen of simplification and support.

Andrew J. Milne, PhD, Tidebreak CEO, on the meaning and impact of collaborative learning environments. 

Mario Maltese, Audio Visual Resources CEO, on the impact of the AV9000 Standard and the future of zero-defect projects.

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

The folks at Luidia built their business around the nifty eBeam whiteboard capture device. Seems oh-so-simple now… stick it to any whiteboard and record your board notes straight to the computer… but when they started out, the general consensus was that you needed a big honking piece of dedicated equipment to get the job done.

While their current market focus is K-12, the eBeam product line offers a lot of value for anyone with a whiteboard and a computer, in other words, pretty much everyone with projects and/or students. In addition to the eBeam, Luidia technology is baked into a variety of products manufactured by 3M, Hitachi, Claridge Products, Chief, edding and Uchida.

How to balance funding constraints with technology needs across multiple installations. Luidia’s Jody Forehand says the company takes a modular approach to solving that problem.

“We’re trying to give schools as much flexibility as possible in how they make their [instructional technology] purchasing decisions,” she says.

In this way, institutions are not locked into having to deploy an expensive, swiss-army-knife solution at all locations. “Just add the components that you need when you need them,” says Forehand. All of this can be accomplished without replacing existing infrastructure.

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.

Ernie Bailey has played a key role in the development of multimedia learning space at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. He served as chairman for InfoCOMM’s Technology Managers Council and contributes to other key industry councils.

Medical Schools like UAMS regard learning space as more mission-critical than general college classrooms because lectures are often delivered by clinicians who, unlike traditional faculty, come to class once a year to lecture on their particular specialty. If the technology doesn’t happen to work the day that Dr. Spleen comes in to teach his hepatic clearance module, the content may not be covered. Alternatively, if a student misses that day’s lecture, they may be in big trouble.

“You’re always going to have two support teams,” says Bailey, “one for AV and one for IT.” Understanding the culture and nomenclature differences is crucial to coordinating support across domains. “We use a lot of the same terms (switch, switcher, router, etc.),” he notes, “but they have different meanings.” So it is important to make sure that everyone is speaking the same language.

What’s your view? Are we seeing the big picture? Leave a reply below or discuss it with fellow AV-1 members on the AV-1 List.