From the Mohave Desert to the University of Texas, Arkansas EPSCoR’s EAT Conference Trailblazes Through Hi-Tech Interactive.
The goal of the Engaging America’s Talent Conference, hosted March 22nd through the 24th at Little Rock’s Peabody Hotel, was for participants to brainstorm on ways to engage America’s young people and get them excited about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
The process can only be successful, however, when educators lead by example and attempt to reach kids where they live. In that spirit, during the conference, participants took part in a truly interactive experience, using cutting edge media applications that students use in daily life.
Of the thirty plus presentations made during the conference, two happened from remote locations.
A team from the Dana Center in Austin, Texas shared a presentation with Dr. Gregg McFarland of Agile Mind who was presenting on stage. They made their Powerpoint slide presentation with help from Glance, a software application that allows guests anywhere in the world to see a user’s computer screen through a web browser, even controlling it if necessary.
During the final day of the conference, Dr. Liza Coe of the NASA Ames Center used Skype software to make her presentation via video phone call from the comfort of her lab in the Mohave Desert.
But perhaps the most impressive outcome of the conference was the way participants took to Google Buzz, a social networking and messaging tool designed to integrate into Google’s web-based email program. Using Google Buzz, users can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" that are visible via the user's inbox.
For the purposes of the EAT Conference, ten separate g-mail accounts were set up for users to enter real-time feedback after each panel presentation during the day. Using Netbooks, participants posted what they saw as the top three most valuable aspects of each presentation. That information was then simultaneously projected on a 9x13 foot video screen for all one hundred and fifty participants to read.
The experiment proved so successful that researchers preparing for similar events across the country are now making plans to follow the EAT Conference model as a template for success.
