Videoconference

media type="youtube" key="phpfWbU2coY" width="425" height="350" =Video conference= On 11 Jan 2008 an introductory video conference among schools in Tianjin and Beijing occurred. The video conference was taped at Tianjin International School (IST) so that IST students could participate in the conference with other students from Beijing at Western Academy Beijing (WAB). Part 1 includes the Tianjin team introducing themselves.

media type="youtube" key="U9rIOWVaDxw" width="425" height="350"

Part 2 includes the Beijing students who are attending the WAB session. Not all students were taped. Towards the end connections were lost. The quality of the visuals are poor. Generally the audio is good. This was taped using a demo of Call Recorder.

Reflections:
The GIN conference on Friday was an eye-opener for me. It was a good experience using high technology to shorten our distance. As Mr. Hannah said it certainly helped to reduce the amount of carbon emission into the air and since this project is primarily focused on environmental issues, I think we had a good start. During this conference, I hoped to share with students in Beijing about our Gui De projects. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there are other student groups in Beijing that are also focused on water sustainability projects and that they have already had some experience with cooperate fundraising: I certainly hope that these groups could sit down together and have a discussion as our own project will near certainly involve cooperate fundraising as well. Overall, it was a good experience and the other shortfall was that the meeting was not as long as we had planned

A big thanks to all the teachers that helped to organise this conference! The pizza was good.

--Yanrong

Personally, it was a fresh experience for me to have a contact electronically with people who have an interest in common and I think it was a fun experience to have as well.

I am now expecting that this conference will be an excellent opportunity for me to convey my thoughts on current global issues. Taking this opportunity, I would like to improve my presentation, organization skills. Actually, I was excited when I was looking the people in WAB and introducing myself. I am looking forward to meeting them in offline and talking with them about many global issues I am interested in and to having different ideas on the issues from them. And also, I am striving to take an active role in the group, presenting the ideas on the issues and experiences we had in Gui'De. I am now very exicted and I hope to have the conference soon with the people I saw thorugh the webcam.

Thanks, --Yoon Sung

The video conference on the last Friday was quite worthwhile for me. As it was the first time for me to meet people through the screen and computer, the conference, to me, gave me a weird feeling. To tell the truth, I was worrying that whether this conference will work or not. When I realized that we could have our meeting successfully, I was really excited to wait the moment that I can actually have a contact with other international students through the computer. Experiencing video conference was really a nice chance to understand other alternative contact method. Moreover, it was really present to save our time, by not spending 6 hours on the road. From this conference, I could know that the water problem is not the restricted problem only for us. There were some a few groups who were charging the water issue. Although the detailed interest differed from ours’, the main focus was basically the same thing. I think we should meet someday to discuss for our project’s development, and modify some of our plans. --Ji Hi

Brief description of what we did: On Friday 11th January, instead of going to the introductory meeting in Beijing we used Skype to video conference it from our school. We introduced ourselves and explained about our project, and the other groups from different schools did the same thing in the conference. Being involved in the conference through skype was good enough. We learned about what other groups are dealing with, and it was good to see that their projects were worthwhile. It was also good to see some groups who were working on the same topic, water shortage problem, with us. However, I don’t think we had enough interaction with the other groups in Beijing; we heard from them but dialogues didn’t go over and there was no question being answered for us to be well interacted.

From now on, for our project, we will meet some people coming from Tibet and listen from them about current situations. We are especially going to meet Luke and learn how to write proposal forms with have high possibility for the companies we deliver to accept the request. We will have to write in Chinese as well so it is going to be a hard challenge. --Joon Hwan

I think that the video conference was overall a successful in allowing us to understand the magnitude of what we will be dealing with. I think that we couldn’t very clearly see their faces though which was kind of disappointing because it meant that we were unable to really connect with the other students. I think that meeting in person will more effective because then I can talk to the people that I specifically want to talk to such as the other students involved with the adopt a village program. I think that it was good because it meant that we didn’t have to travel all the way to Beijing for just a small conference but at the same time I felt like I didn’t actually meet the students that I would be working with. I think that if Jeong min and I could get a hold of the people who are working on the Adopt a Village program and had video conferences with them it would be useful because then I guess we can discuss more frequently and with more ease. I think if we want to discuss with the whole forum it would be better if we were there in person. --Olivia

First of all, I’m very glad to work for the project ‘Adopt the village’ with Olivia, and to be a part of beiGIN which I think is a wonderful event. Last week we were going to have a sleepover in Beijing so that we could talk to students from different schools working on the same project as ours. We ended up having a video conference, but I frankly thought it was a great idea. The meeting was going to be an informal kick off for the project anyway; therefore it was surely good enough. Mr. Hannah told us that we were not just saving our own time but also helping our environment as we did not use fuel and pollute the air by taking a bus trip to Beijing. The conference itself was worthwhile and valuable too. I wasn’t really used to having a video conference like that; it was my first time indeed, yet I thought it was awesome. There were some technical problems occasionally they weren’t too bad for us to get to know each other as well as different projects we were all working on. I did feel that we all had an interaction with those from other schools, which is a positive thing since we wouldn’t feel as awkward when we really meet up later on. I’m really looking forward to getting a chance to talk more with them and learn more about the project and what they intend to do with it in the future. JeongMin