Talking Tech ~ Always Thinking

I slipped the pilot a $5 bill and said "step on it" - I had to get back to Springfield from DC in time for the eduMOOC Tech Panel. He did just that (no doubt a MOOCer himself). We landed 20 minutes early and I raced from the north side airport to the "campus in the cornfields" on the south side of town just as Michael Cheney (of two million lecture downloads on iTunes fame) hit the downbeat to start the session. @Tektrekker led the way with her quiet vocals of techno-tunes. And, @AlexPickett played the pedagogy-drives-technology-choice percussion. Guitarist Nic Bongers picked out second life played in G+. (You had to be there! Or, you have to listen to the recording - URL is: http://goo.gl/w2XuS.

Thanks to Emily, who flew back from the emerging tech conference (her luggage did not seem to fly with her), and went through the labor-intensive process of combining the back channel capture and the panel recording. The recording is better than the original - it has the slides in much larger format along with a larger twitter feed display.

The Twitter back channel was abuzz with tweets. There were groups meeting in circles to discuss. And others joined discussion groups and wikis to comment. Pretty good audio and tweets working smoothly. Emily's improved presentation format for the recordings. We seem to have the basics down for this format.

Much more can be done to enhance and embellish, but in a minimalist way, this mode works to get the panel discussion out there to a mass audience. Nevertheless, it would seem that video would have some appeal. Jeff Lebow has been doing MOOCasts using USTREAM - he has some of them streaming here:

http://edumooc2011.blogspot.com/p/moocast-studio.html

Here's another example of a capture of a G+ Hangout using Camtasia. Rob Jackson explains the process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8n9S33sk3A

One possibility we are testing is gathering panelists in a G+ hangout, then streaming the circle out using the same technologies we are using to stream the panels now. We'll keep tweaking, testing, and assessing technical challenges. The video might gobble too much bandwidth, but we should be able to use Camtasia for recordings as Rob did above.

We will keep you posted. Perhaps, we'll post a mini-panel in this mode.

Nothing like new technologies to to make you think through practices and pedagogies.

"See" you online!

ray