Greetings THATCampers,

As Dr. Bruce Janz mentioned in his previous post, we’re offering to share some after-action details regarding a cultural experiment we just undertook in Fall 2010.  Also, I’ll share some more future-oriented features of the UCF mobile “INTX Lab” in development regarding the best-practices for conducting networked collaboration via a satellite-enabled, 2-way network media feeds, etc.

Watch this 5min INTX-Africa project video in advance if you wish…see below:

• LINK TO AFRICA VIDEO (on YouTube)
• For more background see LINK to INDIA VIDEO from an earlier Cultural Transect iteration back in 2009.

This video highlights a real-time, hands-on musical training and virtual collaboration that was self-organized between producers a location at UCF “Center for Emerging Media” campus in Orlando and remote participants at another location in Cape Town, South Africa. The resulting media exchange was scheduled to occur during the five weeks that two UCF professors (Dr. Bruce Janz and Dr. Rosalyn Howard) were transecting the countryside of South Africa and Swaziland and documenting modern creativity & culture along our brief route…check out the video!  Enjoy the rhythms!  :)

Professor Stella Sung, Brian Tortorelli, and the UCF CREATE lab programed the idea for an African Drumming Session, and student participation was confirmed through existing local coordination with non-profit Nap Ford Community School (located downtown beside UCF on Livingston St.). This idea culminated when the INTX Lab met the drummer and teacher Lucky Paliso, who lives in Cape Town South Africa.

UCF’s research partnership with a local SATCOM company (www.tracstar.net) helped cover significant costs make this experiment possible. You will notice TracStar’s mobile satellite antenna attached to the top of a Land Rover in the video; that gear and bandwidth was donated in-kind for the benefit of this UCF research lab. While this period of free connectivity lasted, we chose eight unique locations to uplink from, and integrated (through UCF Blackboard) a significant amount of existing content already posted for their courses (or at least as much as we could include in the brief, episodic Cultural Transect program format that we adopted)…which is a concept we have been honing along with INTX  Director, UCF Professor Phil Peters.

The media experience for the students culminated towards the end of the semester, yet our work at INTX Lab endures even today as we’re continuing our program evaluation and student-assessment research. More on that later; I look forward to our conversations this weekend…and let me know what you think of the video.  [Special thanks to UCF-OIR and Aaron Hose’ who ultimately produced that short video for us and UCF.]