AV/IT convergence drives installations: q&a with ICIA's Randy Lemke.

Randy Lemke, Ph.D, a former college professor and instructor of AV teachers, discusses the accelerating convergence of AV and IT in the education fields. The International Communications Industries Association (ICIA), headed by Executive Director Lemke, partnered with District Administration and University Business magazines in this year's launch of EduComm, the educational seminar component at the well-known InfoComm Show.

AV: To get started, could you explain the target audience of your association's "AVolution" initiative?

Lemke: It's an educational program to reach the purchasers of audiovisual products and services. The purchaser, of course, comes from a wide number of places in the educational field--it could be from media centers, AV departments, libraries, and so on--but more and more are now coming from the IT department because AV and IT are converging. So one of our big goals is to inform our new buyers about AV products and services.

You mentioned convergence, which is the hot-button topic in AV. Can you elaborate?

There's so much content being created and stored in databases you need someone to be able to see and understand [how to use] that content; that's where AV comes in. But it's all converging because everything in the chain is becoming digitized.

It starts to blur. How do you define AV vs. IT?

We define it as when more than one person is looking at a screen or listening to an audio [presentation], that's AV. If it's an individual looking at a monitor, that's more IT. So when there's a group that has to see, understand, and do something with information, that's where AV gets involved. AV can make sure it's displayed and heard in a useful format. It takes specialized equipment to do that. It's a complex job.

Give us an overview of the complexity of an AV installation.

Putting in an AV application in K-12 or higher education has a lot to do with acoustics, a lot to do with room size and design, a lot to do with things other than just the equipment. When we talk about an AV solution, we're talking about the entire environment, usability, and equipment. It's not just a series of connected boxes.

What drives the evolution of AV?

It's all about content location. The content now might be on a laptop, a video-tape, a disc, or on the Internet. An instructor can now call up the content without bringing in the media. So it's now more viable to have installed systems in classroom environments and the content tends to be more rich so they need more [and better] audio, more control, and more opportunity to teach and less time devoted to being technicians.

At the same time this is evolving, digital technology is also becoming more pervasive and dominant.

Yes, but the content can't stay digital because our ears and eyes are analog. It's the AV industry that successfully interfaced between the digital technology of a computer and a projected image. The display devices were all analog and we were the bridge that brought the digital content to the fore.

I assume that higher education has led the way in this?

Sure. If you look at higher ed applications of visualization you'll see that [IHEs] push the envelope to portray very high-end imaging and engineering and all the science disciplines. Those really led the way to higher resolutions than you would get out of a PC.

Practically speaking, how has the AV/IT revolution affected the in-class experience?

Remember the old art history classes? You would likely be viewing the Old Masters via scratched 35mm slides. Now that class would be presented in a PowerPoint format connected to a Web site so you could bring in visuals as needed. The audio would be first-rate as well. What we have is a high level of technology designed to present content in a room. The next step is connecting rooms, video and Web conferencing that bring classrooms worldwide together.

A practical advantage of digital is easier maintenance, isn't it?

Very much so. For example, Sony has committed to making all its AV devices IP addressable. In a university environment for someone managing 50 buildings and 250 projectors across the campus, that requires a lot of feet on the street to make sure the projectors are set up and running. And the last thing you want is for a professor to walk into a lecture hall and end up and at the AV department because the lamp is burned out. With an IP addressable system, you can centralize maintenance, troubleshoot, communicate with an instructor, and upgrade software.

Is one of the biggest breakthroughs in digital AV deployment the lower price points, particularly at the K-12 level? There are now $999 projectors for education ...

Well, AV implementation and development remains driven by instructional needs. You have teachers with access to content and they want to display it. One of the interesting things about teaching is the need to show students other students' work. This is digital show-and-tell.