I was looking for a service to do video-based discussions. I think this may work quite well. We shall see if it works itself into any of my workflows, though.
“VYou allows people to broadcast video structured as conversations, offering the most personal form of social interaction on the web. It works like this: you record video responses to messages entered by friends and fans. VYou organizes their messages and your videos into conversations, making the experience feel continuously live even though the content is stored.
VYou lets you get advice from experts, interact with your favorite celebrity or organization, or communicate with friends and family using a social presence that persists even when you’re away. As a simple application it can be embedded and posted anywhere on the web giving you tremendous power and creative control.”
Preparation is something I had to learn. While I have always planned, true preparation has always eluded me. I mean to say that the ability some people have for seeing the way things will work out before they do has never been my gift. I have to play my way through everything and push the boundaries in order to get at what is possible. I have to see which questions get asked and which conversations are essential before it all makes sense.
That is why when streaming three concurrent sessions at a conference with two video feeds and one audio feed each, I new that everything would eventually work out. I knew that there would be a plan b that I could put in place. I just didn’t know what that plan b was until I saw it.
Originally we were going to use rented powerful laptops, but we didn’t have the right converters for our video feed. Then we were going to use our Boinx TV mixer to give the pictures nice overlays, but our own laptops weren’t capable of handling all of the multimedia. We were going to have the audio pumped directly to the mixer but the Ustream broadcaster wasn’t having any of it. Ultimately, we had a great stream being pumped out with both the powerpoints and the live video. This is super nerdy and all, but I think that the plan b we came up with was exactly what we wanted in the first place, but it took us a few revisions to get there.
It was the process of finding the plan b that was actually most engaging to me. Knowing that things would work the first time is not interesting to me. It is only through troubleshooting and creating a new solution that I feel valuable. It is about the workaround and the new workflow that everything comes together and I truly learn something.
Which is why I am much more inclined to give my children and the other people that I work with a tool that isn’t specificially meant for the task at hand. Perhaps I don’t have the right one, but more likely I know that it is the process of figuring out just what the tool can do that will bring about the greatest change.
People say that the iPad isn’t a creation device. By making it into one, I am learning more than if I just accept that limitation.
Some say that blogging is dead. By figuring out how to make my writing alive and valuable to me, I am able to find it’s relevance.
The conventional wisdom is that boomers aren’t interested in a networked workplace (Personal Learning Networks and the like). The plan b is in figuring out where we can go from a place of resistance.
I don’t believe that we are ever done planning for the future, and that includes creating a perpetual plan B. I want to make sure that all of my actions are in the creation of the best possible option for what comes next.
We are not creating the first version of the future. Everything is a revision, a second and third and fourth attempt at getting things right. So long as we keep at it, I know that it will be everything that we need. It may not be what we hoped for, envisioned or prepared for. It will be what we deserve and what we work for. It will be our best plan b. I promise.
Making promises is one of the easiest things that I have ever done. They just roll off my tongue after a while. In fact, so long as I am talking to someone that is interesting enough, I will continue to make promises just to keep the conversation going. So long as I can believe in the moment that whatever I am selling is in some way connected to reality, I can justify my promises.
I have promised that Open Spokes would be a platform for answering questions and collaboration. I have promised that we will be able to record webcam video on the fly. I have promised an engaging display and ratings system for the question pages.
I have promised all of these things in the hopes that if I said them enough, theree would be some hope of them becoming true. It is as if I wanted to wish them into being. And as it turns out, I mostly have.
Somehow, thorough all of my high hopes, the system started to work. It started to perform the way that I always knew it could. And yet, I still held it back. I have a working product, one that I think has a huge amount of potential, and I am holding it back for fear that it will be judged too harshly. I have not written about it because I have been worried about people finding out that I am a fraud, that my promises weren’t everything that they were cracked up to be.
I delayed the launch and the testing phase because I wanted things to be perfect. I wanted to avoid the appearance that we are just toting with the idea of what is possible. I have been keeping things under tight wraps, holding on the simple piece of information that Open Spokes is open as of today.
While I am still maintaining that this is a soft open, you can go in and register for an account here. You can then go in and ask your questions and record your reflections. You can share your questions on any social media platform you wish and seek to get responses from others who sign up for an account.
While that may sound nice and technical, it is nothing short of terrifying for me to say those words. The idea I am encouraging people to start actively trying to play in the playground that I have created (co-created with my partner, actually) is so freeing and damning at the same time.
I think my biggest fear isn’t that people won’t like it, but that supporting and developing it will become all consuming. My fear is that it will become something that people actually rely upon.
It is so much easier to believe that you can shut down your project or company at any point and not have any further ramifications outside of yourself. After you have actual users, though, it isn’t yours any more. It is theirs.
That may be the one thing that we miss most in developing new spaces. We miss the fact that simply launching them and having others make them a part of their lives is hugely vulnerable. So, we may try to secretly sabotage our work so that we can go and slink away from it if necessary. With one foot always out the door, it is safer.
Safer, but not as spectacular. Standing beside your creation proudly and proclaiming that it is good is the only way to insure that it actually is good. I guess that is what I am doing. I’m stating for the record that some of the biggest promises I have made in the last 9 months are actually coming true.
I guess I might as well go on the record for stating that the future of networks is in scraping. I know that some people are calling it the social graph and the power of the connections and links and liking and all of that, but I think that it is much better to just call it scraping. Turn on the full twitter or facebook firehose if you have access, but it doesn’t mean anything unless one person sees significance in the data that is being scraped and served up to them.
Just so I am clear, scraping is something that is done with the links part of sharing. It is done with the location part of publishing, the metadata about all of the things that we are passing around. It is in the description of the thing rather than the thing itself.
The benefit of such a thing was made real to me by a single product called DejaPlay. This video pretty much sums up its features:
Suffice it to say, though, this iPad app makes my network real again. I can sit back and watch the things that all of my friends and colleagues have been talking about and I can finally engage in the process of catching up on the inspiration that everyone around me has been calling upon. This app simply scrapes all of the youtube and other video links from your facebook friends and twitter followers and then creates a video playlist for you to enjoy. It does this one thing incredibly well. So well, in fact, that it makes me never want to click on a link again without it being served up to me in a better format.
Twitter Times does this as well with text-based links (as does GoogleReader and Delicious to a lesser extent). It creates a fully functioning newsletter for all of the links that have come through your twitter feed, but I am afraid that this just isn’t enough after watching DejaPlay work its magic. I don’t want a list anymore. I want a tactile exploration through what is going on within my network. I want to explore and have it autopopulate as new information becomes available. I want to dig deeper into what people are reading and watching and see the context for everything that they are sharing. I want to know who the people are that are creating the work I am consuming, and more than that, I want an elegant interface that shows me the path that I have taken down the rabbit hole. While DejaPlay doesn’t currently let me retweet the videos I am watching, I have received direct correspondence from them that it is coming in the next major release. In doing so, the experience would be complete: Network, Scrape, Consume, Contribute.
That is what the process should always be, not to put to fine a point on it. We network to create a space worthy of inhabiting. We find people who are a part of the conversations that we wish to be involved in. We connect to them and start thinking through the problems that we want to solve with their help. We scrape (or should start scraping, anyway) because we know that the value of their contributions is not simply in having them close at hand, but rather in knowing that they are carefully curating our library of knowledge. We have selected them in the networking phase and they are providing us with dividends simply by choosing them. Then we must consume, ravenously, everything that we can from our network. We know that it is good and so we must read and watch and absorb all of the good things that others have to offer us. This type of consumption, unlike our daily bodily intake, never leaves us feeling full. The more that we consume, the more we want to take more in. We make the connections that were always there waiting for us to make them real. Our final step is to contribute back to the network. We curate and add to other people’s libraries. But, now we need to make sure that we are remixing and recontextualizing. Here is where the future is going to come in handy.
Our stuff must get more scrape-able. When we share things, we must share them knowing full well that their contexts must be shifted a hundred times for our network. We must realize that the lists and posts that we have conjured up are meaningless without the ability to dissect them.
Here is what I want:
I would like the ability to see all of the people that I have carefully chosen as a part of my network and I would like to be able to choose what kind of media I would like to scrape from their various shared places. I would then like to be able to flick from their profiles (using my hands, of course) their videos into one corner of my screen. I would like to be able to choose certain people in my network and flick their blog posts into another corner. Then I want to flick the podcasts of those who I know to be quite eloquent with the spoken word (or have an ear for it anyway) into a third corner. The fourth corner I will save for images of those who seem to have an uncanny knack for finding the best arguments through pictures.
I want to be able to play a podcast while looking at the images and then comment on each one directly as I go through. I want to be able to watch a video and then step into the twitter conversation that it sparked. I want to be able to see the blog posts highlighted with everyone’s annotations and then copy and paste my favorite parts with a few of the images that I found and link it together with the videos that are going around in the network as well.
This is what scraping will do for us in the not so distant future. We will be able to remix any type of content into a new one with as few steps in between as possible.
We will know we have reached the point of truly enlightened scraping when we no longer have to care where things are posted (facebook, twitter, buzz, flickr, etc.). We will simply see the people in our network and we will be able to literally grab ahold of what they have shared and put it to our own uses. This will be the future, and this will be now, too.
A single flash user interface for interacting with all videos (A carousel of content)
A hide and unhide collaborative document (Etherpad) on each session that allows for you to contact the individual presenters about their projects and give your own answer to the question on the session.
A chat interface for each session that allows for real-time conversation about any single video or the entire collection
The ability to share SpeedGeek Learning via e-mail, twitter, facebook and all of the other services that come along with “Share This”
I would love it if you would test out all of them and see what there is to see. I would also love any feedback that you can provide this prototype, either by simply e-mailing it to me or by leaving comments on the Planning site (if you don’t have access to that yet, let me know).
The other two things you can do to help the project at this point are as follows:
Think of any way that you could use the SpeedGeek Learning platform within your own work. If there are any videos that you use and would like to collaborate upon, let’s set you up with an instance of your own. If there are certain big questions you would like to answer, let’s answer them with video and collaborative documents. Start to think about pushing the platform to be what you would like it to be. I am up any ideas you have. Just let me know.
Spread the word that the prototype is available. I would love to get as many people answering these questions in the collaborative document and passing the link around as possible. If you feel the need to blog about it, do so. If you feel the urge to tweet, please do so. I pushed out the initial idea, but this is the first version that I can actually show off.
Thank you so much for your continued interest. I can’t wait to get to phase two, which will include:
Recording your own videos within the interface.
Analytics about individual video views
Greater collaboration with the presenters of the sessions
It outlines in very specific terms one way of integrating Google Docs, Moodle, Wikis and Blogs. I say very specific because one of the general hallmarks of the 2.0 version of teachers is that we tend to all be pretty good at explaining things in vague terms for others and specific terms for our students. We tend to be able to project a vision to the outside world and not be able to back it up with the specific ways of getting there, the ways that we got there in our own situations.
The videos at this space are concrete (in-progress examples of just how a classroom can run). The pedagogy page is a brilliant explanation of how all of these tools should fit together, and it may be one of the first coherent things I have seen that isn’t just a list of tools.
However the real reason for this post is not to talk about the site itself, but rather the name. Goomoodlewikiog, although a mouthful, is specific in terms of its purpose. It projects exactly what it aims to: a collection of interrelated tools.
I believe that we should always be intentional in naming things that we want to be associated with. We should always frame our conversations in the terms that we want to be speaking about on a daily basis. And although I’m not sure that I’m going to be using Goomoodleikiog on a daily basis from now on, I am glad that someone is.
My question is: what other terms do I need to make more concrete? When is it time to drop Web 2.0 and start talking with language that actually means something?
This post doesn’t have a whole lot to do with educational technology, but I really had to let everyone who might care to know that my family is moving into a new house. It is our absolute dream home.
I have toyed with the idea of putting up the video tour that I did in order to show my parents, but I’m not totally sure that anyone that reads my blog casually really needs that kind of a detailed view of where my children sleep. If you truly would like to have that kind of voyeurism in your life, send me a direct message on Twitter.
For now, though, just know that I am happy with our decision, and that I cant wait to move in.
As for introducing the subject of engaging students with technology, I think that you would really have to find a good itch that you think all of the teachers want to scratch. What is the one thing that they can do with technology and students that they couldn't do before? Why should they care about technology?
If you are really interested in starting this conversation, I would recommend that you start up a discussion group over at Google Groups or set up a wiki for this purpose. Or, simply get an e-mail group going if that is where your teachers are at. Creating an avenue for this kind of conversation is the only way to make it last. Let me know where you want to go from here. Creating change is not an easy business.
I am in need of your expertise:
I am preparing a session for teachers within my school district on engaging students with technology. My emphasis is on 'ENGAGING' not on putting a child in front of a computer with headphones. Some of our staff has forgotten that instruction still needs to take place even if your are using technology.
My question is…. How would introduce this subject… I would like to show a video to break the ice… Something like MR. BEAN or SEINFELD that would a lead into the subject.
Do you have any suggestions?
Also, I am looking for a professional article to share with teachers along the same subject.
I would appreciate any help that you could give. Thanks so much for inspiring me with your articles and presentations.
I love the idea of being able to archive not only the video of a conversation, but also the conversation that happened about the conversation. Here is a list of links that also were talking about this session. I can’t wait to hear where else this session goes:
What I am more interested in, though, is how are you aggregating the conversations that surround a learning event? How can we make sure that the supports for our sychcronous environments do not go by the wayside.
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