Streaming Video, Just Starting to See the Possibilities in Journalism Higher Ed
At the end of the day on Monday, as I was looking over my social-media stream, I came to the realization that I had streamed almost seven hours of content throughout the day.
I streamed the three classes I teach and initiated a two-way real-time stream with a student who wasn’t able to attend the class. As usual, I streamed the class on my channel on Ustream.tv, pointing my webcam at the whiteboard at the front of the class with a projector showing my computer’s desktop and the websites I use during my hour and a half lectures with students in online journalism and journalism tools.
The student, at home in New England, set up her own Ustream.tv channel and used her web cam to stream from her home. I opened her channel on the desktop and turned on the audio so we could hear her and then we went about the class. I end classes by asking the students to write a 1-minute paper on what they learned best in the class and her evaluation of the experience was positive.
I’ve instituted live streaming of my class this semester as part of the university’s efforts to move forward despite the concerns of the H1N1 virus on campuses across the country. So, even though students might not be able to physically attend class, they have had the option of viewing the proceedings via live stream and several have.
So, I streamed some 6 hours of class. After class, the student editors of NassauNewsLive.com, my hyperlocal community journalism project, held their weekly news meeting and, as has been the case for the last few weeks, I set up my laptop and webcam and streamed the meeting to the web for a half hour, annoucing it via Twitter.
At the end of the day, I took my usual commute home on the Long Island Railroad. When I got to Manhattan at Penn Station, I saw placards being waved and realized the top of the ticket for today’s election in Nassau County was working the commuters going home at 6 p.m. I pulled out my Nokia N97 mobile phone, and brought up the Qik.com application for live streaming video and did quick interviews with three of the candidates.
I coached them beforehand to say their names and to discuss why going Tuesday’s vote was important. I asked them to wait for the red light on my phone to come on and then pause a second before beginning. The interviews were about 30 seconds long and, for the most part, were not too self serving.
I had introduced myself as a professor of journalism at Hofstra and a part of NassauNewsLive. I choose not to do a hard-hitting interview but rather just let them talk, without my presence being too much of an interuption. I was somewhere in between the role of a journalist and an educator and was leaning more to the side of educator. I wanted my students to see what is possible with mobile devices, and the luck of happening into a news situation.
I shot the videos and then rushed out of Penn Station after I tweeted that I was going live. It was a cold night out and the Qik application and my phone were not happily working together as I walked up 7th Avenue trying to send the videos. The 3G network was fading in and out and I was getting about 320kbps bandwith to upload some 2MBs of video. It took about an hour in the cold to upload to the networks and the standing titles reflected my previous shoots — from the Halloween parade on Saturday night.
Still, the videos went online and I continued my walk uptown to 59th Street where I would catch my subway home. I stopped by Times Square where the Yankees scored their first run and I was able to hear the rousing cheer from the New Yorkers there as well as the tourists.
I was tempted to stick around and live stream if the Yankees won, but it was too cold for that. So, I went home after a burrito dinner at a small Mexican stand on 9th Avenue.
I didn’t realize how much I had sent until later, and it just was a moment of realization of how much live streaming video has become a part of my normal days.
Sometimes, it is hard to blog. I try to blog more than every two weeks here, but things get in the way.
So, I think I will try to do more longer-form postings via video. It’s something I experimented with this summer as I took a 2,500-mile road trip. I did not have the time to do formal writing postings, but I was able to do quick 1- or 2-minute videos, holding up my telephone and looking into the camera. It’s one way of sharing, but it’s still very early in this to get more than a couple of dozen views on my streams.
Still, the postings I do with live stream are archived on my YouTube channel, and shared on Facebook as well as linked on Twitter. It’s all part of the developing echosphere of today’s democratized communications and social-media sharing.
What I want to improve is on the conversation surrounding the postings I do.
Do you have any suggestions?
My video channels:
http://www.ustream.tv/krochmal
http://www.youtube.com/mmkrochmal
I’m also on Livestream.com, Justin.tv, Kyte.tv, Vimeo and Blip.tv but these aren’t my active channels for live streaming.
