Or, 10 things I remember from Edulearn24 (the other five)
Contents
06. On Volumetric Video
I’ve long been curious about the possibilities for education of being able to effectively digitise people and recreate them in three-dimensional space and be able to interact with them, in contrast to things like the screen-bound but largely passive experience of, say, watching an educator on video. My first book chapter ‘The Holographic Academic: Rethinking Teleprescence in Higher Education’ (Pates, 2020) goes into these ideas in some detail. Since the introduction of our School of Science and Technology’s (SST) AR/VR Learning Centre, I’ve been exploring the basket of technologies that fall under the category of ‘immersive’ (which include augmented and virtual reality) for what they can bring to teaching and learning. Although a VR headset goes some way towards making a user feel a strong sense of presence and enables a degree of interaction with other forms of digitised people, there’s still the fact of having to strap a computer to your face rather than just leaning back and looking at one.
Enter volumetric video, which was the topic of a couple of the sessions I attended at Edulearn featuring Dr Bryan Carter from the University of Arizona. Carter is Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH), and has a research focus on the intersection between the digital humanities and Africana Studies. Volumetric video (aka ‘volumetric capture’) is a technique for capturing a three-dimensional space or object, which can obviously mean people as well as places. It can be seen as a logical next step after varying efforts like 3D movies to move beyond the limitations of a flat screen, but is technically pretty complex to achieve.
In the session that Carter chaired, he introduced the audience to volumetric video, explaining how it was typically recorded but sometimes live. This was a presentation that went into the theories and possibilities behind the technique, which I found fascinating, as well as sharing some of the learnings that he’d had from the challenges and achievements that his experiments in this space had thrown up. Carter shared a QR code on screen that led to an AR app of him as a ‘hologram’, explaining the work of the CDH. When viewed through a smartphone camera (click here to view), this meant that the ‘holo-Carter’ could be observed in a user’s own physical environment and interacted with by rotating or resizing him. He also showed video of the technique being used with other academics at the university.
This introduced me to a very different view on ‘learner-centredness’. Imagine a learner can go into any physical environment and have a personalised version of their academic expert on demand to guide them through the space? It’s certainly a brave new world view of a possible future of higher education.
An earlier session on this from the same day included a more in-depth look at the technicalities behind it, including the different iterations of equipment, editing methods and processing approaches they’d worked with. One of his students had travelled from Arizona to Spain to give a demo of how it worked, while another was up very early in the morning over in Arizona being volumetrically captured and broadcast into the room at Palma. At least, that was the plan.
I thought that it was a bold move to try such a demo in front of an audience of this size. The speaker, who had been severely delayed in his journey from America getting to the conference venue, connected an Apple TV to the room display and pointed his iPhone at the stage. The anticipation in the room rose, as everybody eagerly awaited something they’d never quite seen before. Naturally, the available wireless bandwidth in the room shrank at this point as delegates tried to load their own local version of what was being shared on their own devices.
And…nothing worked. We waited patiently, but the demo seemed like it just wasn’t going to happen.
After all that effort, Carter’s student speaker was about to give up. Then, by a lucky twist of fate, the next speaker that was due to follow didn’t arrive for their presentation, and a time reprieve opened up. He started again and this time, it worked. We turned to the main screen as his colleague, physically standing in a studio in a pre-dawn Arizona, appeared to be holographically standing on the stage on a warm Palma afternoon. For a few minutes, they spoke to each other. To us in the audience, it felt a bit like watching something from the future. It was an experience I was determined to somehow explore recreating back in London.
07. Artificial imagery
I must have sat through dozens and dozens of presentations at Edulearn24. One thing that I was struck by, particularly given how international this conference was, was how widespread and routinely AI-generated imagery was used as a standard tool for illustrating presentations and enhancing slide decks.
I’ve admittedly had plenty of my own experiments with generating images prior to the explosion of ChatGPT, when the consumer tools were less effective at generating authentic-looking images, and even subsequently when they were much better. I can understand the attraction of generating an image to illustrate a particular point when somebody can’t find a copyright-free photograph or graphic that would elevate the point they are trying to make. However, these days, I tend to be rather put off the idea of using AI-imagery in presentations.
The main concern I have is the environmental cost of using Generative AI to create imagery. Things in this area will no doubt have moved on and even accelerated since last summer, but I suspect this trend hasn’t diminished since. This article in MIT Technology Review states that ‘the energy resources required to power this artificial-intelligence revolution are staggering, and the world’s biggest tech companies have made it a top priority to harness ever more of that energy, aiming to reshape our energy grids in the process’. Enough for a significant pause for thought, at the very least.
There’s also something about the aesthetics, and I don’t mean when the generation has clearly got things wrong like adding additional fingers or a hand in the wrong place. I can’t fully articulate the qualities that I find objectionable in them but I find that many of these images have what I can only describe as a ‘waxy’ quality that makes them appear inauthentic. Even stock photography that is clearly staged seems to me to have a greater degree of ‘soul’ to it than a lot of AI-generated imagery.
08. Sustainability everywhere
Having moved into the education for sustainability space in my own work with the City Law School’s new ‘Sustainability and Climate Change’ module, I was interested in finding out more about what else is going on in this area. Edulearn24 provided more than enough to give me a good flavour.
I attended sessions on how spatial planners are responding to climate change, on Generation Z’s concerns about the environment and their preferences for working in green organisations, and on assessments of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) oriented activities in higher education. I listened to talks on sustainable aviation, collaborative robotics (cobots) and the circular economy, unlocking inland waterway transport knowledge, maritime education sustainability competencies and of the growing importance of environmental awareness in the automotive sector, amongst other sessions.
I noted that although attendance in these sessions was generally lower than in some of the other technology or pedagogy-focused ones, the spread of topics and attention given them in the programme suggested that sustainability education was being taken seriously across the global landscape. There were as many young speakers there as much older ones, with plenty from across Europe and quite a few from Mexico. Some of the sessions went into granular and specific detail, while others took on broad sweeping themes. There were also nuggets of interesting ideas, such as the session on inland waterway transport having developed a novel gamification component to an online course, where the presenter had developed a quiz that, when questions were answered correctly, a ship would rise and move through a gate on the course page.
These sessions reinforced my sense of how complex and multifaceted the world’s sustainability challenges are and how important the role of education was in addressing them. I also got a sense of hope from the extent to which these examples from a younger generation than mine were using their education to apply themselves to these big global challenges.
09. Icebreakers
One of the reasons for going to a conference is that you want to encounter tangible practical things you can bring back and incorporate into your own practice. ‘Icebreaker Techniques for Enhanced Undergraduate Student Experience’ sounded like a session that would have such takeaways, and so it turned out to be.
The session was run by a Hungarian teacher of Marketing, and immediately he kicked the session off with one of his techniques. Firstly, we were all instructed to pick up a piece of paper from under our chair, write a kind or creative message on it, then fold it into a paper plane and throw it somewhere in the room. The next step was to pick up a nearby plane and read the message. He then ran another icebreaker technique, where all participants also had a PostIt note and pen made available. We were each asked to write a nice and genuine message on it to the person next to us and then share it with them. I don’t now recall the message my neighbour wrote for me, but I remember being quite touched by it. Both of these were remarkably effective in not only breaking the ice but also making the room more receptive to the presenter’s overall message.
He shared some other examples of the techniques that he’s used in his classes, along with examples of the literature that backed his claims up. Ice breakers and short games like this were, in his view necessary because students tend to come to class with a variety or different motivations, can do so exhausted due to reasons like short breaks between sessions or morning/evening classes, and may find themselves in mandatory classes that they got bored by. Ice breaker games can establish familiarity and interaction, create a positive learning atmosphere and encourage participation in the learning process.
It was a great example of how even some short and simple activities can make a crowd of people feel more connected to each other.
10. Mexican sound walks
The session I was most intrigued by was called ‘Experiential Learning. Understanding the Ecology of Sound from Sound Walks and Field Recordings.’ The speaker was very engaging and taught music technology at a Mexican university.
He started the session by asking for silence and then for us to listen to what we could hear. The subtle hum of the air conditioning in the room was the first thing I heard, but eventually I tuned in to the sound of my own heart beating in my ears, as it pumped my blood around my body. ‘It’s kind of weird to provoke silence!’ the presenter said after a while, going on to talk about what we can learn about a place we are in through the sounds we are perceiving, and that what we had been experiencing was an ecology of sound.
He asked us to imagine listening for the same sounds a hundred years ago and a hundred years into the future. I suspected that the air conditioning would not be what I was hearing a hundred years ago, and that the hotel complex the conference was being held in undoubtedly wouldn’t have existed, never mind the road that it was built on. Who knows what that room would have sounded like in a century’s time, if it was still standing?
Max Neuhaus was the first artist to make use of a sound walk back in 1966, which is a walk with a focus on listening to the surrounding environment. Our presenter was at Edulearn to tell a story of how he uses sound walks in his teaching. He would take his students on such a walk and ask them to imagine how the walk would have sounded both a hundred years ago and a hundred years into the future.
Sound logos are short pieces of audio where sound is used as a form of trademark. The task he would set his students was to design a sound logo for a particular subject, and his pedagogical approach was to deploy sound walks (although no doubt he had plenty of other techniques).
Although I rarely teach these days, it remains fascinating to see some of the creative and unusual ways that some people find as approaches to teaching their practice. This was certainly a session that stayed with me.
Two weeks after I got home, England finally made it to the final of Euro 2024, only to ultimately lose 2-1 to Spain. Seemed a very fitting coda to Edulearn24 for me.
See here for Part I of this account.
References
Pates, D. (2020). The holographic academic: Rethinking telepresence in higher education. In Emerging technologies and pedagogies in the curriculum (pp. 215-230). Springer, Singapore.
