MINDS in Motion

Seiler says the whole MINDS operation in housed in two locations, one "co-location with the carrier," and the company’s main facility in Farmington Hills, Michigan. There the company employs about a dozen servers with a total storage capacity of 12TB. The MINDS gateway and portal are primarily "homegrown" products, says Seiler. The software that powers the MINDS VOD system is simply called the MINDSconnects eLearning Knowledge Center Gateway, and again, it is something developed in-house. The company uses some off-the shelf products in its daily operations, such as those from Osprey, Pinnacle, and Virage.

All MINDS streaming video is delivered in the Windows Media format, in five different bitrate levels, from 150K to 768K. The service is strictly for broadband users. "Any school with T1 or above is a prospect for us," says Seiler, adding that that includes most schools nowadays.

Along with its regular profit-making activities, MINDS also does a lot of public and professional outreach projects—projects that don't bring the company an immediate profit but help it build relationships in the community it serves. For example, MINDS often Webcasts educational conferences such as the prominent NECC (National Educational Computing Conference).

Then there's the Oral History Project, which Seiler calls his company's "goodwill project." This intergenerational streaming media project, being done in partnership with the Library of Congress, is intended to preserve and honor the oral histories of older Americans (primarily World War II veterans). Students throughout the U.S. are currently interviewing older Americans to get their stories. The interviews are videotaped, digitized, and stored in a Internet-accessible repository.

By becoming a member of the Oral History Project (either through MC-eKC or purchased separately), teachers get access to lesson plans, Web-related resources, and classroom activities that relate to the oral histories that are already preserved at the OHP Web site. MINDS also provides teachers with the encoding, storage, hosting, and online streaming of the video interviews their students have collected.

The Oral History Project has recently expanded its purview to include stories from veterans of all U.S. wars, including the most recent one. For example, with the help of MINDS, Texas educators were able to bring a firsthand account of the Iraq war into Texas classrooms via a live video conference with Lt. Col Steven Russell, an Army officer who served in Iraq. The May 10, 2004 event was co-produced by MINDS, Polycom, VTEL, Data Projections, and Texas Education Service Center, Region 9.

Using a mix of Polycom ViewStations and VTEL video conferencing systems, the event linked Lt. Col. Russell, who was appearing live in the Region 9 Texas Education Service Center in Witchita Falls, to 15 schools and 4 Education Service Centers throughout Texas. Each of the schools and centers was equipped with a video conferencing endpoint (either a Polycom ViewStation or a VTEL system), and students at each of the interconnected site took turns asking Russell questions about his Iraq and stateside military experiences.

The video feed was converted to IP through a video conferencing bridge, says Seiler, and streamed live to the MINDS portal. The video was also captured for subsequent playback on demand. "It took us three weeks to put together," says Seiler, "but it provided a valuable educational experience to kids throughout rural Texas." It is a state with many small schools that are miles and miles apart, Seiler notes; it is a state that has a lot to gain from the distance learning applications that streaming media can provide.