In my day-to-day world, I teach some fairly high-tech classes in the digital projection realm, and the students who take these classes come from a wide range of technical backgrounds. For the most part, it’s a very tech-savvy group — eager to learn, and highly skilled in networking, troubleshooting, preventive maintenance and operations. This group is also very comfortable with new concepts and the methods required for setting up digital equipment.
But now and then, a few students have enrolled with little or no technical background, yet they have the enthusiasm to dig in and learn their new equipment from top to bottom. This scenario probably resonates with most customer training situations, either held at the customer’s site or in the manufacturer’s classroom. In this new group of projectionists, many also come from the analog world of sprockets, gears and 35mm film, and the brave new world of digital can often be the cause of fear and trembling. They certainly know their hardware — but software and networking is pure science fiction.
A Steep Climb
Even though this special group faces a steep climb up the digital hill, their new equipment has to be mastered — and quickly. It’s a challenge for the student, and also for the teacher who’s faced with teaching technical concepts to non-technical audiences. In class, we launch into networking almost immediately. When the subject of IP addresses, subnet masks and gateways is explained, often there’s that “deer in the headlights” look from one (or more) of the students. As an old computer-nerd friend of mine once said, this is when “subroutine blank stare” kicks in.
What is the teacher’s task in this case? When something that we take for granted is an alien language to the student, assumptions simply can’t be made — otherwise, it’s a disservice to the overall class. Our job as teachers is to make complex concepts simple, and to find new and unique ways to explain difficult procedures — all carefully balanced, but accomplished in such a way as to avoid slowing the class down. If explanation #1 doesn’t work, our task is to try explanation #2 from a completely different angle (and so on), until communication and learning takes places. Similarly, if our first analogy doesn’t work, our task is to create a second analogy — relating complex concepts in a simpler, clearer and perhaps friendlier manner.
Often, we have to back up and eliminate our own assumptions until a foundation concept rings true with the student. At that point, new concepts can be introduced that build upon common understanding.
The Need to Know
One such classroom challenge is the IP address. In the business world, we unknowingly use them every day when we turn on our laptops. This is because the PC’s networking dialogs are hidden down deep in the setup menus — way behind the scenes. The average user will never discover them and the need will rarely (if ever) arise. When it does, most business professionals leave the IP-related tasks to the IT department — after all, those guys live and breathe this networking stuff.
However, in our professional world of entertainment, rental and staging, when we hook together all of the remarkable audio, video, lighting and projection gear required for a concert, we need a firm grasp of how equipment communicates. We’re the ones who need to know how to right-click our way to the “Properties” dialog — we can’t leave it to IT.
The Old Days
When I first started in the broadcast industry way back in the dark ages, equipment wasn’t networked and the Internet hadn’t been invented. If you wanted your video production switcher to trigger a VTR (Video Tape Recorder) for example, you used a GPI (General Purpose Interface). By electronically closing a GPI relay contact on the switcher, you could remotely press the “Play” button on a VTR that was wired to the switcher — or, you could trigger the VTR to rewind, stop, fast-forward or search to a cue.
As the edit suite evolved, along came the Sony RS-422 serial protocol, which allowed small groups of equipment to communicate within an isolated island. As products evolved, so did the need for connectivity, remote access and the ability to transfer files over networks, with hundreds and often thousands of devices. Coincident with the development of the Internet, RJ-45 (Ethernet) connectors soon started appearing on our gear, and the perils of networking were suddenly unleashed on our industry — which brings us back to the IP address.
The Teacher’s Challenge
If a student is totally confused about IP addresses (or any other high-tech function), I could simply send them off to Wikipedia or YouTube — leaving them to explore on their own, without dragging down the class. Case dismissed — but by doing so, the chances of increasing their confusion are maximized, in my opinion. One can “Google” anything and get a million hits, but not necessarily the right ones or the simplest explanations.
This is precisely the case when searching on “what is an IP address.” Click on a link, and often the first sentence is right on track, but by sentence two, the author is out in the boundaries of the solar system with his explanation — and now I’m the deer-in-the-headlights. Thus, with IP addresses (and any other complex concept), the teacher’s challenge is to set the foundation, eliminate assumptions, draw clear analogies that increase understanding, and approach explanations from more than one angle, if required.
An IP Address Is …
I know, I know — get to the point! Let’s apply the teacher’s challenge to the IP address. My first techie attempt would go something like this:
• IP stands for Internet Protocol, the binary set of rules that computers use for network communications. On a network, an IP address is a computer’s unique identifier. This identifier is used to locate other target devices, and to communicate with them. Each computer must have a different IP address in order to exchange data. Those targets could be laptops, websites, projectors, audio boards or video processors (etc.), but each has an IP address at the core. The address itself is a series of 12 digits in groups of three, each group separated by periods. These groups are called “octets,” and each group ranges from 0 to 255. For example, 192.168.100.254 represents the unique IP address of a particular device on a network.
But having given that explanation, if there’s a deer in the headlights out there in the classroom, my second attempt might go something like this:
• An IP address is essentially a computer’s home address, so that the digital postman knows how to deliver mail. If you want to communicate with (or deliver to) that computer, you need to be in the same city and neighborhood, with knowledge of exactly where that computer is. We call this being in the same IP “scheme.” Now, a computer’s subnet mask is like a zip code — a special function that limits a set of addresses to a particular range. To complete the analogy, the computer’s “gateway” is like the border patrol. If you have any hope of ever communicating with that computer (or device), you better know how to get in the gateway.
From the simple to the complex, the challenge is in finding the right foundation for understanding. Often, it’s as simple as creating just the right analogy, and expanding from that point forward. If you’d like to experience that deer-in-the-headlights feeling for yourself, visit Wikipedia and search for “IP address.” You’ll quickly learn why the digital postman is a much better way to start the lesson.
Paul Berliner is president of Berliner Productions in Davis, CA. He can be reached at pberliner@plsn.com.
