The Dlink DCS-1000W
network camera is a great option for this: the camera is inexpensive (under
$300), has a built-in 802.11b connection, uses interchangable standard (CCTV)
video lenses, and is robust and reliable. We've used this camera for over a
year so that grandparents who live far away could view their granddaugher; the
camera has made a real difference, and has performed flawlessly. This
page contains some sample images from the camera.
Dlink also makes a model that streams audio in addition to video, the DCS-2100+
I've used a Buffalo Tech access point with WEP enabled for about 15 months and have never experienced anything like you describe. My network includes 4 XP machines and as well as a wireless network camera.
So, perhaps the problem lies with your particular router or its firmware.
I am a faculty member at an online University who works from home. I also take care of our six-month-old baby during the day, so I have some good experience about juggling familial and professional roles!
Here are some things that I do that help me work more effectively; they may or may not be useful to you.
I) GET A TOLL FREE VOICEMAIL/FAX NUMBER:
I have a toll-free voicemail/fax number from www.ureach.com. This is the number that I publish in the main directory and provide to my students; only the colleagues I work the most closely with have my direct home number.
The uReach account is highly flexible. When a message or fax comes in, I automatically receive an instant messaging notification via instant messaging and the message/fax itself is immediately e-mailed to me. I can also set it up so that voice messages "ring through" to my cell or home phone -- this can be useful when I expect a call from a student.
Using this service as my main source of voice contact means that I am interrupted by few voice calls.
II) USE E-MAIL TOOLS TO HELP YOU STAY ORGANIZED
Since e-mail is likely to be one your primary sources of contact with your employers, you want to be sure that you have the tools you need to use e-mail efficiently. Our institution uses Outlook, so I've got to live with that. There are quite a few utilities that make this easier; the best, by far, is the messaging database program NEO: Nelson Email Organizer (http://www.caelo.com/).
III) DON'T OVERLOOK THE BENEFITS OF INSTANT MESSAGING SOFTWARE
I used to have no patience for the idea of online messaging. However, I've found that it is a great complement to e-mail that allows me to "build community at a distance" with students and colleagues. Students know that they can contact me via IM and get a answer to a question with no e-mail delays. I also frequently use IM to interact professionally with colleagues at work, and I've also gained a lot from informal discussions with colleagues via IM -- it is a way to stay connected, to maintain some sort of "presence" even though you are in a remote location, and, when used properly, can be an efficient way to communicate with work mates. Your employer's "corporate culture" may or may not promote the use of IM, but if it does do not overlook the possibilities of this communication tool.
IV)INVEST IN A HIGH-QUALITY SPEAKERPHONE
At my workplace, we have frequent teleconference calls. A speaker phone makes life easier, but you will be miserable unless you invest in a high-quality unit. You can grab a high-end unit on Ebay for under $100. This will make your life easier and help you to present a more professional face when you interact with colleagues by phone.
V) MAKE USE OF THE FLEXIBILITY THAT WORKING FROM HOME PROVIDES
To the extent that you are allowed to set your own hours and tasks, etc. do so. Instead of reflexively working to imitate an inflexible traditional work schedule, reflect on how you might be able to benefit from the flexibility of working from homes. Doing this might also allow you to navigate conflicts with family responsibilities, etc. more gracefully than by, say, declaring your home office "strictly off limits" while you are "at work" -- that sort of rigid schedule isn't realistic in most cases, I predict.
Read again: the seller describes receiving money and then being unable to send out the corresponding auction item because he cannot figure out which of his auctions the payment is for.
How difficult is it to associate a payment amount, the name associated with a money order, the return address, etc. with an auction? If a seller cannot manage to keep track of which payments go along with each auction, he or she doesn't deserve a sterling ebay reputation!
This even goes for cases where a buyer does not follow all instructions -- in this case, it sounds like the seller cannot deal with small problems and minor mistakes without blaming someone else.
In other words this sort of complaint is irrlevant to understanding whether Ebay's policies need to be changed: what it tells us, rather, is that sellers like this one need to take more responsibility for managing their own affairs effectively.
Let me get this straight -- it is Ebay's fault that a seller can't keep straight what he has sold and ends up not being able to associate payments with auction.
And what gall: to complain about buyers who have the termerity to give negative feedback when the item they paid for never arrived!
Yes, there are several good freeware pop3WAP services out there and, yes, some of the phones come with robust POP3 support.
For folks who use MS Outlook, a cooler service is provided by www.loudpc.com. This (pay) site gives you a client that provides remote access to all your Outlook data -- you can read/write e-mail, read/change contacts, appointments, tasks, etc.
The service works with WAP as well as from any browser. For those who can use a service like this, the price is reasonable.
The central question is: are you ready to go to college next year or not? If you are not ready -- because you don't realy want to go, because you don't have the academic skills or motivation necessary to do well, etc. -- then the worst thing to do is to go. In that case, you waste time and money and squander the precious opportunity to secure strong educational outcomes for yourself.
So, from my perspective as a college teacher the opportunity to do it right is too precious to waste. As long as you use your time off to become better prepared to succeed, to get a clearer sense of why you want to go to college and want you want to achieve, or to have interesting and enriching life experiences then educationally taking a year off is well worth it, and it will be recognized as such by nearly anyone within higher education.
Yes, of course bad design CAN hinder good teaching; the question here is whether folks' bad experiences with WebCT are due to "bad programming" in that package or bad course design by their instructors.
My point is that pedagogical design matters most: a good design can make the best out of limited tools, and a bad design can create a miserable experience out of the worst tools.
So, this is why I say that elegant programming is neither sufficient nor necessary for creating an environment where good learning and teaching to take place.
In the case of WebCT, good teaching is certainly possible, whether or not it is "poorly designed" according to certain criteria. The posts in this thread generally don't talk about pedagogy and course design at all, so it is difficult to know the source of the problems folks encountered with WebCT -- they may have been bouncing against the limits of the software, but may well have been facing teachers who hadn't yet learned how to effectively teach online.
Good point: the online career path certainly suits scholars in the humanities better than those in technical fields. Home officel labs are a little expensive to set up!
Check out the Free
Online Scholarship Newletter for very interesting discussions
about "how the internet is transforming scholarly research and publications."
Also James Morrison's
interview with this project's founder, the net-savvy philosopher Peter Suber.
Your question assumes that the only tele-commuting option is for you to work at home from wherever you wife's academic job search leads her. As you suggest, this leads to your family having little or no geographic choice: you live where the job is, no matter how disgusting a place it is.
Such is the nature of academe....at least until recently. Now there are opportunities to be a work-at-home professor as a long distance faculty member of a University or College. There are good jobs out there with accredited institutions, and the competition isn't as tough as for traditional faculty jobs because lots of folks don't know about these positions.
Two caveats: (1) some academic snobs still look down on distance education, and (2) there isn't anything comporable yet to a "premiere job at a Ph.D.-granding research University."
(Then again, 95% of traditional academics don't land that sort of job, either! So, unless your wife is limiting her search to "first tier" academics only--a nearly suicidal job search strategy for academics--the distance education option is worth throwing into the mix.)
Private lessons are expensive, but group lessons are much less expensive and more social.
If you need to learn the most dance skills in the least amount of time, then book exclusively a professional dance teacher's time and pay for his or her time.
If you want to break into the competition scene, you'll need private instruction -- and, believe me, the costs of that will be moderate compared to all the other expenses of the strange competition sub-culture.
If you just want to learn social dancing, a group class will teach you what you need to know for a fraction of the cost of private lessons.
The main consumer 802.11b wirless netcam, the Dlink DCS-1000W, is unsuited for your task. It DOES work well as an entry-level wireless netcam, but isn't at all ruggidized or set up battery powered or indoor/outdoor operation. (It does, however, accept stanards CCTV lenses, which opens up the possibility of adding a more versatile lens with more iris control and perhaps a zoom. Perhaps it would be possible to together enough casing/power hardware kludges to get it to work. Off the shelf, however, it won't give you what you want.)
Panasonic has some "prosumer level" wireless netcams that might do the trick, although I don't think that there are any of them that meet all of your requirements.
COURSE DESIGN: From the point of view of an instructor/course designer, WebCT is an extrmely flexible platform -- much more thn, say, Blackboard. If your one experience with the platform was negative, this probably reflects on poor course design on the part of your instructor.
INTENSIVE INTERACTION AND WORKLOAD: Students may sign up for an online course because they assume that it requires more work, but perceptive students quickly learn that the medium actually requires more time than a traditional classroom. The point is simple: the best educational advantage of distance education is the opportunity for much more intensive interactions between students and students and students and instructors. These interactions take time, but lead to strong educational outcomes. So, if course is designed to promote intensive interactions, the students will work harder and learn more.
Slashdot Mirror
Dlink also makes a model that streams audio in addition to video, the DCS-2100+
I've used a Buffalo Tech access point with WEP enabled for about 15 months and have never experienced anything like you describe. My network includes 4 XP machines and as well as a wireless network camera. So, perhaps the problem lies with your particular router or its firmware.
I am a faculty member at an online University who works from home. I also take care of our six-month-old baby during the day, so I have some good experience about juggling familial and professional roles!
Here are some things that I do that help me work more effectively; they may or may not be useful to you.
I) GET A TOLL FREE VOICEMAIL/FAX NUMBER:
I have a toll-free voicemail/fax number from www.ureach.com. This is the number that I publish in the main directory and provide to my students; only the colleagues I work the most closely with have my direct home number.
The uReach account is highly flexible. When a message or fax comes in, I automatically receive an instant messaging notification via instant messaging and the message/fax itself is immediately e-mailed to me. I can also set it up so that voice messages "ring through" to my cell or home phone -- this can be useful when I expect a call from a student.
Using this service as my main source of voice contact means that I am interrupted by few voice calls.
II) USE E-MAIL TOOLS TO HELP YOU STAY ORGANIZED
Since e-mail is likely to be one your primary sources of contact with your employers, you want to be sure that you have the tools you need to use e-mail efficiently. Our institution uses Outlook, so I've got to live with that. There are quite a few utilities that make this easier; the best, by far, is the messaging database program NEO: Nelson Email Organizer (http://www.caelo.com/).
III) DON'T OVERLOOK THE BENEFITS OF INSTANT MESSAGING SOFTWARE
I used to have no patience for the idea of online messaging. However, I've found that it is a great complement to e-mail that allows me to "build community at a distance" with students and colleagues. Students know that they can contact me via IM and get a answer to a question with no e-mail delays. I also frequently use IM to interact professionally with colleagues at work, and I've also gained a lot from informal discussions with colleagues via IM -- it is a way to stay connected, to maintain some sort of "presence" even though you are in a remote location, and, when used properly, can be an efficient way to communicate with work mates. Your employer's "corporate culture" may or may not promote the use of IM, but if it does do not overlook the possibilities of this communication tool.
IV)INVEST IN A HIGH-QUALITY SPEAKERPHONE
At my workplace, we have frequent teleconference calls. A speaker phone makes life easier, but you will be miserable unless you invest in a high-quality unit. You can grab a high-end unit on Ebay for under $100. This will make your life easier and help you to present a more professional face when you interact with colleagues by phone.
V) MAKE USE OF THE FLEXIBILITY THAT WORKING FROM HOME PROVIDES
To the extent that you are allowed to set your own hours and tasks, etc. do so. Instead of reflexively working to imitate an inflexible traditional work schedule, reflect on how you might be able to benefit from the flexibility of working from homes. Doing this might also allow you to navigate conflicts with family responsibilities, etc. more gracefully than by, say, declaring your home office "strictly off limits" while you are "at work" -- that sort of rigid schedule isn't realistic in most cases, I predict.
Read again: the seller describes receiving money and then being unable to send out the corresponding auction item because he cannot figure out which of his auctions the payment is for. How difficult is it to associate a payment amount, the name associated with a money order, the return address, etc. with an auction? If a seller cannot manage to keep track of which payments go along with each auction, he or she doesn't deserve a sterling ebay reputation! This even goes for cases where a buyer does not follow all instructions -- in this case, it sounds like the seller cannot deal with small problems and minor mistakes without blaming someone else. In other words this sort of complaint is irrlevant to understanding whether Ebay's policies need to be changed: what it tells us, rather, is that sellers like this one need to take more responsibility for managing their own affairs effectively.
Let me get this straight -- it is Ebay's fault that a seller can't keep straight what he has sold and ends up not being able to associate payments with auction. And what gall: to complain about buyers who have the termerity to give negative feedback when the item they paid for never arrived!
Yes, there are several good freeware pop3WAP services out there and, yes, some of the phones come with robust POP3 support.
For folks who use MS Outlook, a cooler service is provided by www.loudpc.com. This (pay) site gives you a client that provides remote access to all your Outlook data -- you can read/write e-mail, read/change contacts, appointments, tasks, etc.
The service works with WAP as well as from any browser. For those who can use a service like this, the price is reasonable.
The central question is: are you ready to go to college next year or not? If you are not ready -- because you don't realy want to go, because you don't have the academic skills or motivation necessary to do well, etc. -- then the worst thing to do is to go. In that case, you waste time and money and squander the precious opportunity to secure strong educational outcomes for yourself.
So, from my perspective as a college teacher the opportunity to do it right is too precious to waste. As long as you use your time off to become better prepared to succeed, to get a clearer sense of why you want to go to college and want you want to achieve, or to have interesting and enriching life experiences then educationally taking a year off is well worth it, and it will be recognized as such by nearly anyone within higher education.
Yes, of course bad design CAN hinder good teaching; the question here is whether folks' bad experiences with WebCT are due to "bad programming" in that package or bad course design by their instructors. My point is that pedagogical design matters most: a good design can make the best out of limited tools, and a bad design can create a miserable experience out of the worst tools. So, this is why I say that elegant programming is neither sufficient nor necessary for creating an environment where good learning and teaching to take place. In the case of WebCT, good teaching is certainly possible, whether or not it is "poorly designed" according to certain criteria. The posts in this thread generally don't talk about pedagogy and course design at all, so it is difficult to know the source of the problems folks encountered with WebCT -- they may have been bouncing against the limits of the software, but may well have been facing teachers who hadn't yet learned how to effectively teach online.
Elegant programming is neither sufficient nor necessary for good online teaching and learning: "it's the pedagogy and the course design, stupid!"
Good point: the online career path certainly suits scholars in the humanities better than those in technical fields. Home officel labs are a little expensive to set up!
Check out the Free Online Scholarship Newletter for very interesting discussions about "how the internet is transforming scholarly research and publications." Also James Morrison's interview with this project's founder, the net-savvy philosopher Peter Suber.
Your question assumes that the only tele-commuting option is for you to work at home from wherever you wife's academic job search leads her. As you suggest, this leads to your family having little or no geographic choice: you live where the job is, no matter how disgusting a place it is.
Such is the nature of academe....at least until recently. Now there are opportunities to be a work-at-home professor as a long distance faculty member of a University or College. There are good jobs out there with accredited institutions, and the competition isn't as tough as for traditional faculty jobs because lots of folks don't know about these positions.
Two caveats: (1) some academic snobs still look down on distance education, and (2) there isn't anything comporable yet to a "premiere job at a Ph.D.-granding research University." (Then again, 95% of traditional academics don't land that sort of job, either! So, unless your wife is limiting her search to "first tier" academics only--a nearly suicidal job search strategy for academics--the distance education option is worth throwing into the mix.)
Private lessons are expensive, but group lessons are much less expensive and more social. If you need to learn the most dance skills in the least amount of time, then book exclusively a professional dance teacher's time and pay for his or her time. If you want to break into the competition scene, you'll need private instruction -- and, believe me, the costs of that will be moderate compared to all the other expenses of the strange competition sub-culture. If you just want to learn social dancing, a group class will teach you what you need to know for a fraction of the cost of private lessons.
The main consumer 802.11b wirless netcam, the Dlink DCS-1000W, is unsuited for your task. It DOES work well as an entry-level wireless netcam, but isn't at all ruggidized or set up battery powered or indoor/outdoor operation. (It does, however, accept stanards CCTV lenses, which opens up the possibility of adding a more versatile lens with more iris control and perhaps a zoom. Perhaps it would be possible to together enough casing/power hardware kludges to get it to work. Off the shelf, however, it won't give you what you want.)
Panasonic has some "prosumer level" wireless netcams that might do the trick, although I don't think that there are any of them that meet all of your requirements.
I teach philosophy courses online full time.
COURSE DESIGN: From the point of view of an instructor/course designer, WebCT is an extrmely flexible platform -- much more thn, say, Blackboard. If your one experience with the platform was negative, this probably reflects on poor course design on the part of your instructor.
INTENSIVE INTERACTION AND WORKLOAD: Students may sign up for an online course because they assume that it requires more work, but perceptive students quickly learn that the medium actually requires more time than a traditional classroom. The point is simple: the best educational advantage of distance education is the opportunity for much more intensive interactions between students and students and students and instructors. These interactions take time, but lead to strong educational outcomes. So, if course is designed to promote intensive interactions, the students will work harder and learn more.