Monthly Archives: October 2010

no time like right now

Tsetc

I've been at the Tri-State Educational Technology Conference all day and have had a blast meeting (or re-meeting, in some cases) a lot of great educators. Among other things, I was here to co-present (with Karen Blumberg —@SpecialKRB) a workshop on Grassroots Professional Development, which went very well and (technical glitches aside) people seemed to enjoy.

But the highlight of my day may have been setting up, with very little forethought or warning, Bill Stites' (@wstites) presentation on Transforming an Education Experience with Social Media. When I ran into Bill this morning — so very, very early in the morning — I asked him if he wanted me to throw a quick article up on the site and embed a live stream of his presentation in it so that eSM readers could play along and virtually watch his presentation. We had an internet connection, a Ustream account and my laptop with webcam — and that was all we needed.

It was a great reminder that it's just that easy to get things online. It took about 15 minutes from the conception of the idea to implementing it — and all the other resources would have been easy to get going if I didn't already have a blog to publish to and a live-streaming account. There's no reason not to take advantage of how simple it is to start broadcasting online.

Everyone's got something they wish others could see, and there's no reason not to make it available for them, too. Bill's talk was available live and then, once it was finished, I saved the recording and published the entire recorded tak. Couldn't have been easier.