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Elections are in the news these days. From the leadup to the U.S. presidential contest in November, to the choosing of a new government in Iraq, to the faulty or nonexistent elections that wreak havoc in some third-world countries, to the controversial voting on a European Constitution, our students can't help but encounter the worldwide concern for the democratic process. Wouldn't it be great if the students in my classroom could discuss these issues face to face with students in Iraq, France, Haiti, Afghanistan, and California? Is there any way that technology can help my students interact directly with people facing the same problems but in a very different setting, across the world or across the country?

This week's article reports on a recent experience conducting a Synchronous Online Seminar with correspondents widely separated by distance, using hardware, software and networks widely available to classrooms. And then goes on to discuss how this technique might enhance instruction in our classrooms.

The SOS

We were separated by distance and time zones, but all working on the same issue. David was in Boston, at the School of Education at Boston University. Kathi was at the Massachusetts Elementary School Principal's Association. Mathieu and Pascal worked at UVPL: Université Virtuelle de la Pays de la Loire in France. Stephane taught at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne, while Christian and Martin worked at the École des Mines de Nantes, also in France. Joe worked for a software company somewhere in California. We were a diverse group, unlikely to be considered a community, except for our shared interest. A few of us had met one of the others in person, but for the most part we were strangers. And yet we all faced similar struggles in our work, and wanted to discuss them.

We had exchanged ideas via email, but this proved impersonal and required a slow delay for interactivity. We wanted to meet at the same time (synchronously), and in the same place (a seminar room, perhaps), where we could see and hear each other and exchange papers and sketch things out in diagrams as we talked. But none of us had the money or the time to travel to a single meeting point. Why not meet virtually (online)? So was born the idea of a Synchronous Online Seminar, hereinafter referred to as an SOS.

Online Meeting Software

Many of us has tried to use this form of discussion. We had used the PictureTel videoconferencing system at Boston University to work with a group of teachers in Illinois. The folks at the School of Mines had used Microsoft NetMeeting and Meeting One to work with students in Morocco. David and Jim often conversed one-to-one with audio and video using iChat. These experiences encouraged us, but none of the systems was capable of conducting the seminar we desired.

- The Picture Tel system required each correspondent to be in a special room outfitted with a PictureTel TV and special cameras and a dedicated ISDN line. None of us had such a room available to us, and to build one would cost upwards of $20,000. And it would allow only one location on the screen at a time, not the six simultaneous faces we wanted to see.

- According to the folks at the School of Mines, Net Meeting is "not the best tool and it works only on Windows ... but it works and we only buy an Exchange server to hold the conferences. We don't use the voice capabilities of Netmeeting. It's not reliable and our students from Morocco don't have a good Internet connection for using voice."

- iChat AV worked very well for a one-to-one session, but was not designed to handle six simultaneous conversations, and worked only on Macintosh.

- The EMN team reported that "Meeting One tools, like the Centra One, can easily be used to make such a presentation using PowerPoint slides and voice. It's reliable and it works fine with Asia or America. The main drawback is the cost. We must rent some server time. We cannot use it on a regular basis."

Our research toward a better tool for SOS led us to Marratech eMeeting, which worked on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. The client software could be downloaded for free, it worked well with all the standard microphones and video cameras, and allowed us to all see each other sat the same time, to talk, to write, and to place documents on a whiteboard. The Internet2 consortium in Boston had installed the Marratech server on a computer (donated by Apple Computer) at Harvard University, which we were able to use.

In our first tests of this system, it worked right out of the box, across the Atlantic and across town. So we scheduled a six-way meeting for February 17 at 10:30 AM EST, 4:30 PM in Europe.

Our First SOS

To join the meeting, we each simply entered the URL of the server into the Marratech software. Of course we had plugged our cameras and microphones into our computers beforehand, using the standard USB and FireWire ports that are present on most modern computers. (The video cameras we used cost between $50 and $150, nothing fancy.) We began to see faces appear on the Marratech screen as each person connected. Each person showed as an icon about an inch square. We could hear each other talk. If you clicked on someone's face, they appeared in live video in a larger window. You could set the software so the one talking was automatically featured in the big video window.

As someone was talking, another would enter a question or comment into the text chat. We listed our names on the whiteboard. We sent clickable URL references in the chat window. We pasted illustrations on the whiteboard. We posed questions and listened to the answers of the others. We endured awkward silences and confusing times when three of us tried to talk at once. We laughed. We almost got to the point where the computer and the software became transparent to us, and we were conversing as if we were in the same room, around a seminar table.

We talked for an hour. We each remained at our desks, in our offices the whole time. After the hour, we disconnected and went back to our work.

This first SOS was not a complete success. The folks at the School of Mines and UTC were unable to get through the firewall that the network administrators had set up in their schools to block the UDP* packets that transmit the video and audio material over the Internet. My little camera shut itself off about three-quarters of the way through, but I was able to carry on with voice and text. Someone used loudspeakers that caused audio feedback at the outset, but switching to headphones quickly cleared that up.

We should have done a little more preparation beforehand, not only to iron out the technical wrinkles, but to read up more on each others' projects before the meeting, so we spent less time at the SOS introducing our work and more time tackling the common issues. But the SOS worked. It cost us little or nothing. We used the existing computers on our desks.

The Possibilities

Imagine this capability in your classroom. "How does it feel," asks your American student to the Iraqi, "to get ready for the first election in decades? Do the people know how to vote?" And to hear his correspondent reply with an explanation of the traditional tribal voting system that, though only open to men, served as an underground democratic force all along. Imagine your students exchanging photos and opinions on environmental regulation with their peers in rapidly-growing countries like China or Brazil where the green movement takes a back seat to economic growth. Imagine a joint data-collection project, with six widely-dispersed classrooms reporting their findings with charts and graphs in their own SOS.

What you need

• A modern computer. We all used off the shelf computers, half us us on desktop computers, half with laptops. Some were on Windows, others on Macintosh, one on Linux. Some of us used USB video cameras, while others used FireWire (DV) cameras.

• A broadband connection. you can't do an SOS with a modem. You need a direct connection such as the Ethernet drop in your classroom, or a cable modem, or a DSL telephone line. Our correspondents used all three in this first SOS.

• Camera and microphone. Some us used simple little webcams, others connected their home video camera, and at least one of us used the Apple iSight camera with microphone. Some of us used the built-in microphone on our computer, some used an external or headset mike.

• The software. We used the Marratech client and a Marratech server.

• A good topic. You need a good reason to conduct the seminar, a strong topic that you're all interested in. The more preparation beforehand, the more valuable will be the live experience.

You can learn more about the Marratech software at http://www.marratech.com. And you can find some great lesson plans on elections for kindergarten through high school-- not requiring SOS -- at the web site of the Secretary of State in Washington at http://www.vote.wa.gov/outreach/index.tpl.

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* UDP = User-Defined Protocol, a method used to send continuous streams of information like audio and video over the Internet. Text is sent with the Hyper Text Transport Protocol, which you know as HTTP.