Presentation Systems
Control Freak
- By John K. Waters
- 06/01/07
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.
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."
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.)