16 November 2005 marked a watershed day in NUS videoconferencing history. ISDN lines were put aside in favour of 30 Mbps high-speed broadband to conduct a telemedicine video conference.

Doctors and students at Kyushu University Hospital, Fukuoka, Japan and in the CIT Auditorium, NUS, Singapore watched a live broadcast-quality video of a bariatric surgical procedure conducted in another continent. Dr Davide Lomanto, Director of the Minimally Invasive Surgical Centre (MISC) at NUH – a prime mover behind this tripartite collaboration – was present to observe the surgery.

High-speed broadband link-up between Adelaide, Fukuoka and Singapore

The procedure, to help a severely obese patient lose weight, was broadcast from Flinders Medical Centre – a teaching hospital and medical school co-located with Flinders University – in Adelaide, South Australia. The video feed was channeled to Japan and Singapore via the specialized high-bandwidth Internet2, supported by SingAREN, which is reserved for academic and research use.

Using the multi-platform Digital Video Transfer System (DVTS), developed in Japan, the audience viewed a laparoscopic non-compressed video of the surgery. The video ran at 30 frames per second, similar to television frame rates. This high quality video allows for proper diagnosis and accurate observation in telemedicine.

Endo-laparoscopic surgery (also known as key-hole surgery) requires a television image, so it lends itself easily to transmission worldwide. Dr Lomanto highlights that ever since surgeons began using this technique, they have been increasingly demanding about video quality.

Dr Lomanto adds, “"Using DVTS and high-speed broadband, we need not compress and decompress the video. The compression and decompression actually reduces the sharpness, brightness and resolution of the video. Another major improvement is that using broadband we can easily reach geographically dispersed viewers without resorting to expensive ISDN lines.”"

Remarkably, the setup between the three cities also involved synchronous videoconferencing. Aside from the video feeds, there was also a simultaneous audio commentary explaining the procedure as Dr James Toouli, Professor of Surgery, Department of General and Digestive Surgery, School of Medicine, Flinders University operated on the patient. Furthermore, the audience could also interact, asking questions or making observations at appropriate junctures.

Referring to this unique event, Dr Toouli opines, "“The possibilities, I think, are enormous in terms of education and how we can make this move forward. One of my main interests in [this] is as a way of proctoring surgery, especially as different forms of surgery expand in different parts of the world.”"

Setting up the telemedicine conference was challenging for all parties involved. The sites involved are, to put it mildly, far apart. “We are not connected directly from Adelaide to Fukuoka,” exclaims Dr Shuji Shimizu from the Department of Endoscopic Diagnostics and Therapeutics, Kyushu University Hospital, “We are coming from Adelaide to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Fukuoka [through] Tokyo actually, Fukuoka to Taiwan and from Taiwan to Singapore.”

The great distances involved inevitably resulted in some lag in audio and video. However, the audience did not perceive a noticeable delay, which is testament to the effectiveness of DVTS, Internet2 and all the technical staff involved in linking the three cities.

Related Links

• DVTS Consortium
• DV (Digital Video) over IP [DVTS]

Educators have always searched for ways for making lessons interactive, as this is key to keeping learners involved. The modern lecture theatre is designed to facilitate learning but there are gaps which prevent lessons from reaching their full potential. KEEpad helps plug one of these gaps.

KEEpad – KEE stands for Keep Education Engaging – is a group and audience response system which enables a high level of interactivity in lecture theatres and classrooms. The interactivity that KEEpad offers is just one of the benefits of the system. With interactive questions, lecturers can instantly gauge the understanding of their students during a lesson. Educators can even create questions on the spot within PowerPoint, if interesting ones comes to mind. Ultimately, KEEpad's interactivity helps increase student participation and knowledge retention.

To get an idea of how KEEpad works, recall ‘Ask the audience’ in the television game show, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Similarly, KEEpad recreates this scenario in a lecture or classroom environment. A lecturer creates a PowerPoint with questions prior to the lesson. During the lesson, each student is equipped with a wireless response pad. When the question slide comes up, the students can key in their answers using the pad. The responses are collated, appearing instantaneously as a percentage on the PowerPoint slide.

KEEpad does this through ingenious software and hardware solutions. KEEpad's TurningPoint software is a plug-in which integrates with PowerPoint. You can create a new presentation or make use of your pre-existing presentations and add questions to them almost as fast as you can think them up. Hardly any training is required to start using the KEEpad software.

While the software solution is simple, it has many power-user features for the questions. For example, you can set a time limit for the students to answer the questions. The software also allows for collation and analysis of answers to facilitate lesson planning. These reports are automatically generated as Excel files.

As with the software, the hardware is simple to set up and use. The radio frequency (RF) version of the hardware consists of a thumbdrive-size USB RF receiver and the required number of RF-enabled keypads, which are slightly larger and thicker than a credit card. These can be deployed quickly, do not take up much space and do not require line-of-sight to work.

The Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine is currently in the process of procuring a pilot set of KEEpads for use in their lectures.

CIT offers several video conferencing modes in NUS: high-end video conferencing, Virtual Classrooms and eMeetings (desktop conferencing). These cater for different purposes and audiences.

The table below lists the details of the video conferencing modes available in NUS. This will help you to decide which mode is most appropriate mode for your needs.

Feel free to contact Mr for further queries regarding CIT's video conferencing solutions.

NUS video conferencing infrastructure.

CIT is currently working with Computer Centre to integrate the University's upcoming IPTel phones with the existing video conferencing infrastructure. Also in the pipeline is the introduction of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which will run alongside our H.323 systems. These developments will give NUS staff unparalled flexibility in video conferencing.

Without search engines, trawling the web would be nearly impossible. There are billions of web pages amounting to a veritable information overload. Used effectively, search engines help reduce this mountain of information into a molehill of relevance.

Six search tips
1. Be specific...
General searches turn up millions of web pages. Try this search:
NUS
Then try this:
National University of Singapore

Both search terms return millions of pages but you’ll find that NUS returns results for the National Union of Students, among other entities, as it is a more general search. Be aware that most search engines exclude prepositions such as ‘of’ and ‘for’.

On a related note, try typing in a question you might have directly into the search engine. You’ll be surprised to find that some search engines ‘understand’ natural language queries and point you to relevant sites that may answer your question.

2. ...but not too specific
While specificity is good, searching with too many terms may lead to poor or no results. If you have used many terms and get no results, it is probably best to widen your search by dropping a few terms.

3. Use search engine math
Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, suggests that “search engine math” will enhance most internet users’ search results. Based on true Boolean operators, search engine math consists of addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Addition +
Using the + symbol ensures that the word will be included in the search. Try this search string:
National University of +Singapore

This places an emphasis on the word “Singapore” in the phrase.

Subtraction -
Using the - symbol excludes terms from a search. If you are searching for a topic that covers a wide area, it helps if you remove terms you know will clutter results. Try this:
National University of Singapore –-services

You should find all the academic-related sites in your search results, leaving out most service-related NUS sites.

Multiplication “ ”
Using quotation marks to enclose search terms tells a search engine to look for the exact phrases. Try searching with this phrase (remember the quotation marks):
“"National University of Singapore"”

Notice that this search string returns significantly fewer results than the earlier search without the quotation marks.

You can use these math tools in combination too, almost like applying the BODMAS rule in mathematics. For example, "“National University of Singapore"” -services will be a more targeted search for NUS’ academic-related web pages.

4. Know your search engine
Different search engines have different features, strengths and weaknesses. To optimize your search results, you should know your favourite search engine’s features and defaults. The following resources detail various search engines’ features:

• Infopeople - Best search tools chart
• Search Engine Showdown - Search engines by search features
• Search Engine Showdown - Search engine features chart
• Search Engine Watch - Search features chart
• UC Berkeley Library - Recommended search engines

5. Use specialist search engines
There are various niche search engines which specialize by subject areas. There are numerous search engines for each broad category. Listing them all would take up a lot of space but a good place to start is Search Engine Watch’s specialty search engine listing. You can also search for specialty search engines e.g. if you are a medical student, you might search for medical “search engine”.

6. Use more than one search engine
Despite Google’'s primacy in the search engine world, its index does not cover the entire web. The index is not complete as there are millions of websites with billions of pages which are constantly changing. This is an overwhelming number, even for automated crawlers. It is best to try a few search engines, especially when searching for esoteric subjects or items.

Here are some search engines you may want to try:

• Alta Vista – one of the original search engine powerhouses in the early days of the web
• MSN Search – newly revamped, MSN Search sports an uncluttered Google-like home page
• Clusty & Teoma – Clusty and Teoma have small indexes but cluster or group results by key words
• Librarians Index to the Internet – a peer-reviewed index, it is more of a directory than a search engine but the sites listed are quality information sources

Future developments
‘Search’ in general is poised to be the next big thing in technology. Google, almost unsurprisingly, is at the forefront of this growing trend. With Gmail, Picasa, Google Desktop and Google Scholar, Google aims to extend fast and easy searching to our e-mail, digital media collections, desktops and academic materials. Other search engines/portals have also jumped onto the search bandwagon, coming up with their own desktop search tools.

Resources and articles

• Pandia’s 17 recommendations for Net searching - A helpful article outlining search tips and strategies
• Interactive Boolean Search Tutorial - This enjoyable tutorial covers Boolean search techniques.
• Google Cheat Sheet - This webpage details tips, tricks and shortcuts for using Google.

Dr Ang emphasizes a point, annotating his lecture slide - note the additions to the diagram on the right.

The lights dim, and it begins. At the outset, this seems like a run-of-the-mill engineering lecture in NUS. But it is no ordinary lecture. As the lesson progresses, Assoc Prof Ang Kok Keng stops to emphasize a point, circles a diagram and adds a calculation to the PowerPoint in his handwriting. As he does this, the writing appears immediately on the projected presentation slide. The Tablet PC makes this, and more, possible.

This piece of technological wizardry has been helping Dr Ang overcome the some of the challenges of teaching a large class. And EG1109 Statics and Mechanics Materials – compulsory for all engineering students except those studying chemical, computer and electronic engineering – falls squarely into this category. About 400 or more students take this module every semester.

Two problems of teaching large classes are the challenges of grabbing the students’ attention and integrating interactivity in lessons. Dr Ang, who teaches in the Department of Civil Engineering, uses a two-pronged approach to tackle these challenges.

"“One [approach] is that my course notes are very brief. The course material is purposely left with a lot of blanks, so when they bring these notes along to the lecture theatre, they have to follow me through the material, almost literally working with me,”" Dr Ang explains, “"They cannot simply just lay back and listen.”"

Complementing and aiding the use of incomplete lecture notes is the utilization of the Tablet PC with PowerPoint. Although this presentation software is a powerful tool on its own, Dr Ang enhances it through the Tablet PC.

He illustrates, "“I use the Tablet PC to help fill in the blanks that I’'ve left for the students. At certain points, I use the pen to start writing in blank spots. These are critical points I want to stress to them. These are also points where I need to slow down for them to fill in their notes I write over my PowerPoint in various colours and thicknesses of pens. And I never fail to excite my students by using the virtual eraser to erase my scribblings.”"

The Tablet PC in use.

“"I use the Tablet PC to write, to emphasize, to annotate. It is my mouse and my pointer, combining the advantages of the good old blackboard or transparency with PowerPoint. I get the best of both worlds. I find that most of the time in my surveys, I invariably get feedback saying that the students like the Tablet PC. That’'s the kind of encouragement I get,”" Dr Ang summarizes.

The idea of writing on a computer screen might still rankle those who enjoy the tactile experience of putting pen to paper. Dr Ang feels otherwise: "“It's a matter of a little adjustment. It’'s more of getting used to it. Some will no doubt be uncomfortable. Some will be writing without paying attention that what they are writing is appearing on screen. But I'm comfortable. It’'s almost as good as writing on the blackboard or a piece of paper. It’'s fun!”"

Tablet PC use is still in its infancy in NUS. However, Dr Ang notes that he is not the only academic using the Tablet PC to enhance their lectures, with several proponents around campus.

Dr Ang is a trailblazer in using IT for teaching. His pioneering effort in putting course notes online, before the days of IVLE, won him the Teaching Excellence Award for use of IT in Teaching in 1998. Using the Tablet PC for lectures is just one of his more recent efforts to incorporate technology and teaching. As the former Director of the Centre for IT and Applications for Engineering (CITA, now known as e-IT Unit), he helped develop IMPARO, an online tutorial and quiz system. He has recently received a Faculty of Engineering Educator Award.

Tablet PC links

• What is a Tablet PC?