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A Short History of EstuaryLIVE

I've always felt my motto (with apologies to Margaret Mead) should be "Think small, reach big." As a independent producer working in environmental and educational film and video, I've always enjoyed working with as few people as possible. No big payrolls, no egos, just convince myself and one or two others of the value of a project and go to it.
About five years ago I had been producing a series of videos for the North Carolina National Estuarine Research Reserve program...this group administers a number of pristine and environmentally delicate estuarine areas along the North Carolina coast. Our video would try to teach children the value of estuaries, often called the ocean's nurseries, to our environment.
After a day of filming on the Rachel Carson Reserve in particularly cold and miserable conditions, I sat with Susan Lovelace, Reserve Education Coordinator. We were warming up in a dockside eatery in Beaufort, lamenting the fact that the film we'd just shot will be the only way that most folks will ever get to see the wonders of Rachel Carson or any of the estuarine reserves along America's coast. What people don't know and don't understand...they are not willing to protect. It seemed so obvious to us.
The Rachel Carson Reserve is a unique series of islands and salt marshes running parallel to the Beaufort waterfront. It's not that difficult to visit ...Tiger Woods could hit it with one drive on even a bad day. Yet it is only moderately visited for recreation and less for education. Possibly the Reserves are cursed with a name no one understands ...estuarine (one child said it sounded scary). Where the rivers meet the sea...now that sounds poetic and inviting...not estuarine.
The Reserve education staffers do their best and every year they get hundreds of school children wet and muddy trying to teach them about habitat, filtration, nutrient soups, adaptation, economic value and defense against storms. But because of staff limitations, those kids represent only a part of the fieldtrips requested and a fraction of the number of students Susan would like to introduce to these "waters of life".
Five years ago, a millennium in internet time, we sat in that cafe looking out at the Rachel Carson Reserve and someone said "live streaming video." Actually I said it, although I truly didn't know what it was nor had I really ever seen it work during my net surfing. "Live streaming video"...wouldn't it be cool to take kids on a fieldtrip, one that chances are they'd never make otherwise, using a computer right in their classroom. It would be completely free for schools.
We could talk directly to students, live, not pre-recorded on tape, they could see for themselves and if they had a question we could answer it. Of course, we didn't know how we would actually find out what their question was. In fact we didn't know anything about how to do this or was it even possible. This was an island, to be sure, and I was pretty certain the Coast Guard would frown on sinking a video cable across the channel that separated our Reserve Office from the islands.
Susan seemed to like the idea, she would try anything to "spread the word." Although I always thought she was just a bit dubious of my ability to make this happen.
Sometimes the best way to make something happen is simply to announce to the world that you're going to do it...and that's what we did. How overly optimistic we were back then ...although our expectations were low, none of us had ever actually seen streaming video and the closest thing I'd done to this was set up a webcam in my studio which managed one new picture every three minutes. I was pretty sure this wasn't exciting enough to hold the interest of children. But we pressed on.
I began doing a lot of research. I looked at the different "schemes" for transmitting video over the internet. I found that all the techniques produced fairly poor and barely moving images, but it was still magic to think these images (described by one teacher, much later, as reminiscent of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon) came into our homes and classrooms over little wires, for the most part telephone wires.
Quite quickly I found out that all the big companies involved in streaming video had one thing in common. They really were not interested in talking with someone who just fell off the turnip truck and had no money to spend on this project. This was a little frightening because in four months we'd actually promised teachers we would do this.
After some weeks I found one company that was different from all the others. They advertised a streaming video solution (that will remain nameless to protect the guilty) that used a technique of quickly pushing still images, on a good connection you might get several per second, to give the appearance of moving video. You couldn't send sound with it but they did provide a chat window so we could type descriptions of what we might see and receive questions from students.
These folks were actually nice to me, they were helpful and they said "no problem." When I asked how much a week of this service might cost, they said "Hey, how about $200." This was a lot different from they way I was treated by the big boys. There was only one little problem...this process, it turns out, had been developed for what we will euphemistically call the "adult entertainment industry." I suspected these guys were so helpful because they were trying to redeem themselves. I breathed deeply and wrote out a personal check immediately.
Overcoming, at least for the moment, the first challenge we'd faced in actually doing a "virtual fieldtrip" (perhaps we'd just coined a new term), we tried to figure out how to send video images back from the islands to shore. Believe it or not the idea of the long wire was seriously discussed and fortunately dismissed. If you ever watched NASCAR and wondered how those in-car pictures made it on the air...well, we did it the same way. This, however, did require some money.
Using a remarkably well-timed grant from East Carolina University, we purchased a tiny microwave video transmitter similar to those transmitters used in racecars. It cost about $3000 and worked "marginally" well...we discovered that microwaves just do not like to travel across water. However, it did work and along with our streaming technology we found ourselves up to our knees in estuarine waters.
We knew, the first time we saw this work on a frigid October morning, that things had changed in a big way. The picture was jerky and Amy Sauls, one of the Reserve educators, was typing so fast the keyboard was heating up...but students in schools far-flung, warm and dry, watched Susan Lovelace pick up the shell of a Channel Whelk and watched a hermit crab pop out to see it's own reflection in the camera lens. It was like nothing we'd ever seen before.
Our first "EstuaryLIVE" was a pretty big success. It may have been the coldest, rainiest October on record in Beaufort but we survived. We reached thousands of students in three days, perhaps more students than visited the Reserve in an entire year. We did it on a shoestring and did not disappoint any classrooms. However there were some problems. Not being able to send sound was a problem, one unruly bunch of students typing their own questions into the chat window nearly sunk us. Plus, I had become obsessed with the fear that our videostreaming company might get one of their streams switched with ours and cause a scandal not easily recovered from. We had to do it better, faster, smarter, safer and still keep cost minimal.
On Sept. 13, 1999, my company bought the domain www.estuarylive.org. We tried to give teachers tools to help them use the virtual fieldtrips and integrate them throughout the curriculum. In addition to lesson plans and links, we provided special copyright free movies and stills for students to use in Hyperstudio and Powerpoint presentations.
Our number one priority was to keep this free to any school wishing to participate...but we had to improve our streaming technology. Late into our second year we began using the more state-of-the-art Realmedia (one of the companies that didn't want to talk to us in the beginning). This allowed us to broadcast sound and picture. This leap was made possible when the Reserve office was able to secure use of a high-speed T1 connection and by the generous support of the North Carolina Dept. of Education, which allowed us to stream through their server. These partnerships saved huge amounts of money.
I convinced my company Marine Grafics, which was fairly easy since it's only me, to invest in far more sophisticated video transmission systems...and these systems proved their value when students watched (and heard) the first flutters and chirps of a baby egret only minutes out of the egg on a rookery 3.5 miles away from our base.
Since it's inception we have done a fall and spring EstuaryLIVE each year. Generally we have had two or three "virtual fieldtrips" each day. We'd tried to encourage classes to sign up in advance but anyone can come, anytime. We try to schedule fifteen to twenty classrooms for each session, which allows for real interaction with the students.
 Questions now come in through a special form page we created. We can receive a student's question in about 30-seconds to one minute...in another minute we can radio the question to our fieldtrip leader and it will be answered with an encouraging "we just got a great question from Mr. Smith's 7th grade class at Apex Middle school." We are told that classes cheer when they hear their names coming back over the internet.
Some schools are using EstuaryLIVE in ways we'd never expected. East Lee Middle School in Sanford, North Carolina, tells us they based their entire year's science curriculum around EstuaryLIVE and they integrate it into all aspects of the curriculum including a hard look at the economic costs and benefits of environmental protection. Mrs. Cynthia Wicker, an East Lee math and science teacher, once wagged her finger at me and sternly said "you can never stop doing it now!"
 We have become smarter about collecting information about who and how many are participating in the fieldtrips. We created a form page which teachers can use to sign up and schedule their fieldtrips. Our registered teachers "sign on" for their fieldtrips using the question form and we can get a good idea of how many students are participating in each virtual fieldtrip. Our actual our-of-pocket cost per students has range from pennies some years to no more than a dollar when grant money was available to pay for equipment or services. This does not, of course, take into account the huge amounts of time volunteered by all involved.
 Last summer NCNERR organized a three day teacher workshop and brought teachers in help us do better. We have also tried to collect more feedback from teachers using a survey form that we created. We've gotten good information and this has resulted in some academic publications, great plugs on educational web sites and some good press.
 We have found, however, that teachers are busy folks and the best and most constructive feedback we've received has come from those teachers compelled, for some reason, to write us.
One of our best moments in EstuaryLIVE came from a teacher who wrote to us after the event to let us know that his students had really enjoyed the virtual fieldtrip and learned a lot about the environment. He taught special needs children, in this case kids with severe behavioral problems...students who, because of their problems, would never be allowed to go on a fieldtrip of any kind. This is something we had never considered.
 We know this is a "small" project. It has grown considerably over the years but we know that it will never become "big." No one wants it to. Much of the success we've achieved comes from being small enough to sing Happy Birthday to Mrs. Golden, a teacher in Portland, Maine (not our finest hour) or go back and show that fiddler crab one more time because Mr. Marshall's class had another question. These things just don't happen when you send out a videotape.
 We know that during an EstuaryLIVE we make about six thousand student contacts (some classes join us for more than one fieldtrip). We know that we've reached many states and a number of countries, the most distant being Australia. Last year we were asked to coordinate EstuaryLIVE with NOAA's (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) celebration of National Estuaries Day (http://www.estuaries.gov/ ). We had a little money to spend and we made a splash reaching twenty-thousand viewers from the mid-West to the Middle East. Yet that event was far less satisfying than receiving one good or interesting or even profound question from a middle-schooler who may have never even seen the ocean.
 Teachers learned long ago that if you throw a rock in the water, ripples reach to the far side of the pond. With EstuaryLIVE we learned that small projects do excite students and inspire teachers to do better and the results of that will, we believe, travel far. What we know and understand, we will be willing to protect.
Without Susan's constant encouragement and willingness to plod through the mire of state and national bureaucracies, EstuaryLIVE would not have succeeded. All the folks at NCNERR, especially Doug Coker and Amy Sauls, have been vital to the success of this program.
 Small groups of committed people can make a difference and, as Margaret Mead wrote, it does seem to be the only way it happens.

-- Bill Lovin, Oct., 2002
for the Tech Museum of Innovation Awards		 Bill Lovin (eLive co-founder) and EstuaryLIVE muse Dr. Cris Crissman


Susan Lovelace (eLive co-founder), Education Coordinator for the NCNERR until recently and now a consultant in environmental education, interviews two eLive participants


Dr. Cris Crissman films the action


A taste of sea lettuce


Lifestyles of the wet and muddy


This filming location is across from the town of Beaufort


Using a seine net to find critters

Bill Lovin filming with an underwater camera at Middle Marsh

Amy Sauls answers questions during an early eLive event

Capt. Doug Coker, Ed. Coord. at NCNERR, ferries a boatload of teachers


Kids from Beaufort Middle School get a look at eLive technology

Young egret at Middle Marsh

Video equipment used for the production and webstreaming of eLive

Just before an early morning fieldtrip to the Rachel Carson Reserve

Let's hope the sun never sets on EstuaryLIVE!
 



www.estuarylive.org was purchased and is maintained by Marine Grafics.
Photographs, videos and animations on this site are owned by their respective copyright holders.
Estuary animals are drawn by and copyright 1999-2003 Dr. Cris Crissman.