This week brings to an end the industry summary PowerPoint presentations that we've each been delivering in my Marketing Communications class (BUS 227). Most students e-mail our professor their presentation file beforehand so that they can easily present using the classroom's digital projection screen. A wireless mouse at the speaker podium enables slide advance.

With his laptop hooked into both the projector and the ethernet, Professor Fly has been able to use technology in the best way I've seen yet at Calloway. In-classroom technology has been used most often to play commercials on demand throughout the semester. During discussions, a student might mention a commercial that she saw recently. As she explains what she liked and didn't like about the ad, Fly hops onto AdCritic.com and queues the commercial for the rest of class to watch. Eight by six foot, full screen QuickTime video then plays ( with surround sound) for our class of twenty.

But even if their efforts are premeditated, video-on-demand for students isn't always that easy. As I'm typing this, another industry summary presentation has been paused to deal with problems after the presenter attempted to incorporate video into her slideshow. Of the nine presentations that have tried to use video this week, only one has worked without considerable problem. Why?

  1. Without our own AdCritic accounts, it's hard to find commercials on-line. Students must hyperlink to a company's website (if the commercial is available), or download it elsewhere and include the file directly within their PowerPoint presentation.

  2. But then students can't transfer their big file video attachments to the professor. The files won't fit on a floppy, and usually surpass e-mail attachment limits. Even though our laptops have CDRW drives, most students aren't familiar with burning data discs.

  3. Every student here has a nice ThinkPad, so why not just plug in and present? CRT and line-out audio work fine, but the professor's Logitech's USB wireless mouse doesn't seem to get recognized by everyone's laptop. Nevermind Fly repeatedly telling me, "You'll need to install software to use that mouse." USB was supposed to solve that, wasn't it? My laptop had the mouse operational within ten seconds of connecting the USB base; my friend John's ThinkPad never heard it plug in.

Even integrated hyperlinks to web-stored video files violently stab into the presentational flow. Linking directly to the video file would require pouring through the HTML source code, so it often takes at least three clicks (and the starting of two new applications- web browser and video player) before the first frame begins.

We've got blazingly fast ethernet, dozens of laptops, and at least one DVD player in the classroom. VHS shouldn't be the best method for student-driven video display within the classroom. Here are some quick thoughts/solutions to each problem addressed above.

  1. I e-mailed the class at the beginning of the semester to suggest the less-professional but equally extensive adland commercial archive. Their subscription rates certainly fall into more student budgets than AdCritic. Otherwise, does Calloway we have a shared AdCritic account that could be accessed from the library?

  2. USB thumb-drives would work great for moving files from the dorm room into the class room. Too expensive to deploy? Each student also has public network space available, but I'd guess that less than 5% even know how to use it. Students logging and in and out between presentations to access their home drives is about as practical as spreading their PPTs over multiple floppies. Instead, students should drop their video files (or entire presentations) to their web space on www.wfu.edu  But before that gets adopted, this feature drastically needs to be easier to use. Why do I have to change permissions through the web each time I upload something to my WWW_HOME via FTP? That doesn't seem very logical.

  3. Is it possible that the mouse installation worked seamlessly on my machine because I'm running a fresh installation of Windows XP, as opposed to Information System's default load?

In the end, technology certainly helped more than it hurt these presentations. This example is just another instance where all of the opportunities are there for amazingly fantastic technology use in the classroom (including student effort!), but the connections fall short at time of execution.

My name is Nick Gray, and this is my website. I graduated from Wake Forest University in 2004 with a B.S. in Business.

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