goddess of clarity

Adventures in Livestreaming: Student Music Ensembles

January 23, 2013 higher education No comments

An occasional series in which I fumble my way through the world of live-event coverage. I screw up so you don’t have to.

If your university is home to the kind of wonderful student performing groups we have here at the University of Rochester, and you are not currently livestreaming their performances over the Web, may I humbly suggest that you make it your belated New Year’s resolution to start. Or to at least try. I promise you they are the low-hanging-fruit of awesome when it comes to starting and sustaining a live-event-coverage program.

Last semester, I started a livestreaming pilot program with a few of our music department ensembles: the Jazz Ensemble, Wind Symphony, Symphony Orchestra, and Chamber Orchestra. I can happily report that these events have been the most successful events I’ve livestreamed so far. And I am measuring success in terms of both the total number of viewers and the sheer blissed-out happiness expressed by viewers and performers alike at the opportunity to participate in something they had no way of experiencing before.

The first “shake out cruise” was the Jazz Ensemble’s fall concert. With very little promotion, the livestream attracted a sustained viewership of around 40 listeners, with a high of 53. Earth shattering? No. But consider that most of this group’s performances attract around 150-200 in-person attendees. The livestream availability increased their usual attendance levels by between a quarter and a third, without detracting from that in-person attendance.

And that online audience was beyond thrilled. Here is the very first comment received on the built-in chat during that very first livestreamed concert:

8:10 PM universityofrochester: This is the first jazz ensemble concert to stream live on the Web
8:10 PM universityofrochester: We appreciate any feedback you may have
8:11 PM parent: pan the camera left-we can’t see the rhythm section
8:14 PM universityofrochester: is your student in the rhythm section?
8:14 PM universityofrochester: I can try to zoom in.
8:15 PM parent: yes – thanks – the bass player

And it only got better from there. Here is some of the commentary from the Wind Ensemble performance the following week, which sustained 100 viewers throughout the entire concert, and hit a high of 121 (again, with an in-person attendance of around 200):

8:15 PM MommaLi: Go Greg from Ma and Pa Danchik in Pittsburgh!
8:15 PM Jay: Kedar u played well and nice job! made me and your dad very proud…
8:18 PM Jaclyn: go vicky, go! love you, lady!
8:19 PM MommaLi: “Rust Belt” making us proud tonight : ) Go horns!!!
8:27 PM Websters: Enjoying this very much! Thanks for livestreaming for those of us who can’t be there in person.
8:28 PM akshay: Beautiful! Enjoying this sitting in Carlson doing my assignments!
8:29 PM Jairo: I am abroad and this is awesome!
8:30 PM memphismary: I see my girlie sitting between the 2nd and 3rd sax players–yay!
8:44 PM MommaLi: Thought we’d get the tree decorated tonight but we’re glued. Go Emily! And huge thanks UofR for this privilege.
8:45 PM URalum89: UR doing a great service and these are wonderful artists. It is a great way to stay connected to the University. Thank you.
8:45 PM lysolmom: You are doing great, UofR – Miss everybody there so much -you are All fantastic, and this is better than an old lady like me could ever imagine!

When I shared this feedback and viewership stats with the conductors – along with the fact that the livestreams had attracted viewers from Kuala Lumpur, Brussels, Australia, Florida, California, North Dakota, Virginia, etc. – their jaws literally dropped. Needless to say, we are planning to livestream all the major music ensemble performances this semester. This data also helped justify my department’s decision to go ahead and purchase the ad-free version of the livestream platform we are using (Livestream.com; $3,250/year for 3,000 ad-free viewer hours/month).

Here are some tips on how to get started livestreaming your own students’ musical magnificence.

(1) Talk to the right people. Finding out who the right people are on any campus can be a challenge in and of itself. In my case, I first spoke to the press officer in our Communications office who handles publicity for our concert events. She put me in touch with the Music Department’s concertmaster, a faculty member who also administers the department’s performance programs. He then put me in touch with his student technical staff – they set up the house sound before each concert – and with the director of the Jazz Ensemble – he was an eager and gracious “guinea pig” for the first livestream. NOTE: it took two-and-a-half months between my first point-of-contact to my first dry-run of livestreaming a rehearsal. So be patient, young grasshopper. And persistent.

(2) Address issues of copyright. You’d need to take a course in copyright law to understand all the intricacies of rights to sound recordings and performances. In fact, I have taken a course in copyright law, and I still don’t understand them. Luckily I don’t have to. The aforementioned concertmaster handles all copyright concerns when the ensembles are putting together their programs for the semester. For much of the classical music repertoire, copyright is not an issue since works are in the public domain. Also our university has signed contracts with the three major publishing rights organizations – ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. So far, there has been one song in one concert that we did not have clear rights to based on these agreements, so for that song I simply unplugged the audio source from the laptop and explained to the online audience what was going on. And we did Not. Lose. A single. Viewer. They stuck around for six minutes of silence; that’s how much they want this stuff. On your campus, talk with those involved in planning performances of musical works and possibly your university counsel to make sure you have all your intellectual property ducks in a row.

(3) Get the conductor on board. The conductors of the major ensembles I’ve worked with so far – Bill Tiberio of the Jazz Ensemble and David Harmon of the classical ensembles – have been amazing, enthusiastic, and gracious. From the very first one, Tiberio welcomed the online audience from the stage (just as he would welcome the in-person audience), repeated the livestream URL multiple times, and encouraged attendees to send the URL to their friends and relatives at home (which I saw several audience members doing from their phones as the concert began). This has set the tone for the rest of the performances.

(4) The technical stuff. Short answer: it’s all about audio. These are musical performances, after all. For me, my setup is probably embarrassingly low-tech, but it works. (You can check out the archive of the Wind Symphony performance at http://livestre.am/4eYB8 for a sample; fast-forward to the 20-minute mark unless you enjoy watching people mill about.) I use a Canon Vixia HV40 camera – an older model HD camera with a Firewire output. I connect the camera to my Macbook Pro via Firewire, and then connect to the output from the auditorium’s sound board with an RCA audio adapter into the stereo mini-jack input in my laptop. The craziest part is that the sound board is in the back of the stage, so I run a 200-foot extension cable from the stage to my laptop, which is set up in a break in the auditorium seating. Honestly the part of the set-up process that takes the longest is taping this cable down with gaffer tape. But on the upside, I do get to say “gaffer tape” with an air of knowledge and authority.

So what’s next? Obviously the parent audience is key here. These are folks who have probably been watching their child perform at recitals and concerts since the kids were in grade school. Now imagine that for the first time you can’t attend every performance, because your kid is in Rochester and you are in Pittsburgh. It’s kind of a no-brainer that for this audience, this content is unbelievably valuable. My next step for this semester, though, is to try to work with our Admissions office to see how they might use these livestreams as a way to reach out to prospective students. I have to imagine that showing a high school student with an interest in the arts and biomedical engineering just what it would be like to study and perform at our university could also be potentially helpful to students making their college choices.

–lori

A Meeting of the Mindsets: Real Students vs. The Beloit Mindset List

August 22, 2012 higher education 6 comments

Inspired by a 2009 blog post from SUNY Oswego’s Tim Nekritz and the hilarious #fakebeloitmindlist Twitter hashtag initiated by same.

Just in time for back-to-school, the annual Beloit College Mindset List was published on Tuesday, providing quick-and-dirty insights into the minds of today’s college-bound 18-year-olds. For instance, did you know that the Class of 2016 is younger than you? Shocking, I know.

To me this list has always been a weird combination of sure-it’s-true-but-what-the-heck-does-it-have-to-do-with-anything facts (“There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles.”) and whose-ass-did-they-pull-that-out-of overgeneralizations (“They have always lived in cyberspace, addicted to a new generation of ‘electronic narcotics.’”) As a fun, informal glimpse into the world of people born in 1994, the list is mostly harmless I suppose. However, if you do a Google News search for Beloit Mindset List, you’ll find more than 600 media references to the list as an arbiter of freshman knowledge and tastes, with everyone from the Christian Science Monitor to eCampus.com getting in on the act. (The infographic from eCampus.com is particularly … infographical. In that it contains both information and graphics.)

This year, the authors of the Mindset List even offered a webinar to help struggling old fogeys “understand the mindset of today’s modern student.” Well as luck would have it, on the same day the list was published, I had another opportunity to understand today’s students: I attended a meet-and-greet reception for our new EcoReps students at the University of Rochester. These are the incoming freshman who work with their fellow classmates on issues of environmental sustainability in the dorms. And I discovered something fascinating: these students are people. We can talk to them. And if you work on a college campus, they are everywhere. I’m telling you, this place is lousy with them.

So what did I learn from my conversation with about 10 actual students? Here are a few insights, provided in a convenient and popular list format:

They all say they hate Facebook, but that they still use it. Primarily for groups. (Hey, look! Something I have in common with the youth of today!)
Most of them admitted to lurking rather than actively participating in their “Class of” Facebook group because occasionally someone will ask a good question. But “it’s always the same people posting all the time,” was an agreed-upon complaint.
Only one of them was on Twitter. She was also on Instagram, and said these two have basically replaced Facebook for her as the way she communicates with her social circle. The students who weren’t on Twitter seemed to agree that the reason they weren’t was because they didn’t really have any idea what they would say on Twitter.
They all agreed that they wished they got more information about their fall courses online earlier. “I wish the syllabus was available already; I just want to get started!” got enthusiastic nods.

What does any of this say about the mindset of a generation? Nothing. I just love the opportunities I get to talk to our students. I have to seek those opportunities out more proactively in my job as a Web developer and editor in a central communications office, but I am always impressed and happy when I do. And you won’t get that from no list.

–lori.

How Higher Ed Covered The Supreme Court Healthcare Ruling

June 28, 2012 higher education, politics No comments

I was curious today to see how colleges and universities responded to the Supreme Court decision to uphold the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. So I looked at the homepages and main newsroom pages of the 61 schools in the Association of American Universities (AAU) to find out. These schools are the leading research universities in the United States and Canada. What I wondered was this: in addition to pitching their faculty experts and doing other media relations activities that have traditionally raised the profile of our institutions, how many colleges and universities chose to be their own publishers and tell their own stories regarding the big news of the day?

The answer is: not that many. Of the 61 schools, 45 did not publish any Web content about the ruling by the end of the day Thursday.

For the other 16 schools, I would say that the online coverage fell into three categories: experts lists or pitches, actual news stories, and real innovative approaches to communicating directly to your audiences about an important national story.

At the top of that last category I would put the University of Chicago, followed by Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. The University of Chicago live-tweeted a discussion among its law school professors hours after the ruling came down. The discussion was Storified and linked to from the university’s homepage. I just think it’s amazing both that they got something so substantive together so quickly and that they were thoughtful enough to include ways for a larger audience outside the room to participate. At Harvard, the Harvard Gazette published a complete package with expert commentary and video, and the School of Public Health will hold a live webcast tomorrow, which I think is a fabulous way of allowing members of your own community (and by extension the general public) to benefit from the expertise of your best professors and researchers. Finally, Berkeley linked to faculty bloggers from its homepage, another great way to show the character of your university while sharing informed opinion to both internal and external audiences.

Of the schools that did their own news stories on the matter, I would say that Brown and Emory were fairly representative. Brown included five different short reactions from professors in various health-related fields. And Emory did the same, with the addition of some commentary from law school professors along with an older “explainer” video from a health policy professor.

Better-than-average story approaches I think came from Duke and Stanford. Duke provided a fully reported and well-written story summarizing faculty reaction from across the university, as well as a separate story explaining that the decision would not affect Duke’s own benefit plans. They were the only school that I saw that did that, and I think that is a great idea: anticipating the questions of your own community and reassuring them right out of the gate. Duke also included a Storify of faculty tweets in the immediate aftermath of the ruling. From its homepage Stanford linked to a story from its School of Public Health that was a kind of rolling blog with commentary from different professors added throughout the day. And once again we see Storify in action, with the university’s law school professors’ reactions added to the mix by the end of the day.

Hmm, that’s three uses of Storify to collect faculty commentary and reaction on an important issue. So far, I have only used Storify for big, student-focused events like Commencement and Move-In Day. It’s great to see some inspiration for using it as a way to capture research stories or academic stories.

Finally, with what I would characterize as the lowest level of content creation and storytelling, were the experts lists that several schools compiled and then linked to from their homepages or newsrooms. Some typical examples include the experts lists at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas.

I’ll be honest and say that these lists feel like missed opportunities, and they kinda depressed me. I should say that here at the University of Rochester I am in the large group of AAU schools who did nothing so, hello, kettle? This is pot. But still, these lists just make it clear to me that the goal of the communications offices that produced them is to get the name of the university into print, and not to help members of their community understand a complex issue, an issue that some members of the university community are experts in. And that seems to me to be a very limited, very “insider” goal. I should also say that I’m not a press officer, so I don’t have a good sense of how successful these experts lists are in achieving media relations goals. But does it need to be a zero sum game? If you are going to take the time to compile these lists, would it be possible at the same time to get a few quotes and write up a simple story that your own community could read and benefit from directly?

With both CNN and Fox News rushing to report today’s Supreme Court decision news (and getting a few details wrong in the process) perhaps there is a place for the smart people at research universities to become another direct source of news?

–lori

April Fools and Kitten Analytics

April 2, 2012 higher education, serenity One comment

This Sunday to mark April Fools Day, the University of Rochester homepage was overrun with kittens.

The homepage itself has of course reverted to normal, but the gallery lives on.

I did a little number crunching this morning and found that homepage itself received 34,604 pageviews yesterday; the average number of pageviews for the homepage on a Sunday for the current semester is 11,868, so we saw nearly triple the average traffic. So as a sheer driver of eyeballs, kittens it would seem are fairly successful. 38% of those visitors came from inside the University network, which is fairly typical.

The number of unique visitors to the website was also significantly higher this past Sunday than on an average Sunday. We had 16,500 unique visitors on April Fools, which is a 55% increase over the Sunday average this semester of 10,616. This tells me that we had both more people coming to the site and more people hitting refresh more often to see the images. We also had a much lower exit rate than normal – 32% compared to 55% – and most of that difference seems to be accounted for by people going right to the lolcat page – which accounted for 19% of the “next pages” clicked off the homepage on Sunday.

The homepage photo gallery was viewed 2,287 times yesterday, and about 8.7% of those visitors clicked through to one of the secondary pages listed in the kitty captions (About Us, Majors and Programs, Grad Studies, etc.) The “lolcats” gallery was viewed 3,444 times. 38% of that traffic came from Facebook, 25% came from the homepage, and 13% came to it directly, which I take to mean came from our weekly student e-newsletter which delivers at 8am every Sunday. (We don’t have clickthrough data for Weekly Buzz — which we’d changed to “Weekly Purr” with a kitten masthead for the day — but if I’m analyzing this right it looks like about 460 people clicked on the link to the lolcat page out of about 5,500 recipients). The lolcat page also had a significantly higher time on site number than the site average (1min 47sec compared to 1min 9seconds) but also higher exit and bounce rates than the site as a whole. Which is reasonable, I guess. People came and read all the jokey lolcats, rated their favorite ones, but then didn’t move on to anything else.

Recommendations: This year for the first time we tried to integrate the April Fools jokes with facts/messaging about the University. In hindsight, I would have done this even more, especially on the lolcats page where people did seem to spend some significant amount of time reading. Bottom line: kittens are good drivers of traffic. But when making lolcats, MAKE MORE LOLCATZ!

–lori

8 Sources of Inspiration for the New Facebook Timeline

March 23, 2012 higher education No comments

The new Facebook “Timeline” layout for Pages rolls out for everyone — like it or not– on March 30, eight days from now. Are you ready to go? Here are eight ideas and sources of inspiration to get you thinking.

1.) Choose a cool cover image. The most visually striking feature of Timeline is the new cover image at the top of the page. This image is an opportunity to show visitors to the page something unique and gorgeous about you. When choosing this image I think it is especially important to think of new visitors who have not yet liked your page and do not yet potentially get your updates through their News Feeds. Karine Joly at collegewebeditor.com compiled a list of some example cover images from early adopters in higher ed.

For inspiration outside higher ed, I look no further than Cupcakes by Heather & Lori. Of course, the subject matter works in their favor. You can’t go too far wrong with cupcakes! But I love the idea of seasonality here, with their Easter cupcakes on display. Shows the potential fan what is interesting now.

This idea could definitely work in higher ed, around the academic calendar, around sports seasons, etc. Even the standard quad building beauty shot could benefit from a sense of season.

2.) Let your students provide your cool cover image. As much as I love our professional photographers, I think the cover image provides a new opportunity to showcase user-generated content.

At the University of Rochester, we’ve been running a homepage feature for about three-and-a-half years called Photo Friday. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni (even the occasional parent) submit photos and we choose the best to run as the large homepage photos every Friday. Visitors to the site vote on their favorites over the weekend, and on Monday we announce the favorite. We always post both the homepage gallery and each week’s winner to the FB page, so why not make the winner the cover image for the remainder of the week?

3.) Provide your fans with their own school-themed cover images. I love this idea from Arizona State. They provided ASU-themed cover images for their Sun Devil-crazed alumni and students, all sized up and ready to be used by their fans on their own profile pages. Such a great way to allow your fans to show off their school pride to their Facebook friends.

BTW — the cover image dimensions are 851px by 315px. You can upload a larger photo than that and Facebook will allow you to slide it around to position it as you like.

4.) Use custom cover images for your apps. Facebook tabs are a thing of the past in the new Timeline. They’ve kinda been a thing of the past for awhile though, relegated as they were to links along the left side as opposed to the true tab interface.

I never used a default landing tab other than the Wall, so I’m not very familiar with how those used to work. But in the new Timeline, tabs have a new life as apps. And each app has its own thumbnail image. There are default images (and labels) provided by Facebook, but you can change these images to align with your graphic identity or to just stand out more. This video describes how to manage and edit apps custom settings.

Be warned: there seems to be some kind of bug in apps/tabs made with FBML. On the UofR page, for example, it keeps replacing the custom image I added to our Fast Facts page with the logo from CBS News. Also, at their developer’s conference in 2011, Facebook announced that FBML would no longer be supported starting on Jan. 1, 2012, and that FBML tabs and applications would cease to function on June 1, 2012. So something else to worry about, then.

5.) Link to your livestreamed events from your Facebook page. Cornell’s Alumni page includes a link to the Livestream.com Facebook app in its line of Facebook apps, which I think is awesome. It allows users to watch a livestreamed event while logged into Facebook — right on the school’s Facebook page — and invite their Facebook friends to join the livestream. This feels like a great way to allow for word-of-mouth communication about your live online events.

6.) Use milestones to stitch together a narrative. The new milestones feature allows you to go back in time and create Facebook posts from your school’s past. Honestly, I don’t know how much time someone who is already a fan of your page would spend clicking back through decades of milestone posts. But if you stay focused on a particular narrative and get a little creative, you can have some fun with these. For example, LSU uses milestones to track the history of their many tiger mascots, going back to “Mike I” in 1936. A fan page for a specific sports team could post a milestone with the records/stats from every season, creating a kind of almanac within Facebook and making their page a real informational resource for fans.

7.) Highlight posts to showcase great art or fans’ posts. The left-right/back-and-forth layout of the Facebook Timeline takes a little getting used to, but the Highlight feature I think makes it worthwhile. When you highlight a post, it breaks free of its left or right side of the page and spans the whole page, giving a really great photo a chance to shine.

One thing I have not gotten the hang of yet though is the fact that fans’ posts to the Wall are relegated to this “Post by Others” ghetto off to the right. I’ve already missed two questions posted there by parents of admitted students, finally replying days later. Not cool. You can highlight Posts by Others, but they are still stuck over their in their box. In the past when people would post questions to the Wall, I would sometimes re-post them so that fans would potentially see them in their News Feeds and weigh in. It will take some getting used to, but the new layout right now makes it harder for this admin to keep on top of these.

8.) Pin a post to the top of your page during important points in the academic year. Timeline allows you to “pin” a post to the top, so it doesn’t get pushed down when new items are posted. I think this concept works particularly well with higher ed’s academic calendar. Sending out your early decision letters and expecting a potential flood of new fans or visits to your page? Why not pin a “Welcome, admitted students!” post to the top of your page that week, with a link to the “Class of” group. Moving-in day coming up? Pin a post linking to a check-off list of last-minute things students should bring, accompanied by a fun video of current students showing how to pack.

Well, that’s all I got! Have you run into any other inspiring Timeline ideas, or are you working on any yourself? I’d love to hear more about them in the comments.

–lori

What George Washington Could Teach Higher Ed

February 28, 2012 higher education, politics No comments

I’m currently attempting to read a biography of each of the U.S. presidents in order; it’s a personal project that appeals to both my love of history and my linear, completist nature. And I figured perhaps these leaders of the free world might have some lessons to teach us about higher education, technology, or both. Plus, if car dealerships can celebrate Presidents’ Day for the entire month of February, so can I.

Four Things George Washington Could Teach Higher Ed

from Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life

1. Leaders listen. Washington’s entire management style was founded on a slow, deliberate decision-making process with input from as many experts and constituencies as possible. Unlike the British generals, who chose their staffs and fellow officers based on family standing, Washington chose self-made men like Nathaniel Greene, Henry Knox, and Alexander Hamilton as his advisers. These men were empowered to speak their minds to the Great Man, and he was open to persuasion, changing his mind when the weight of opinion was against him. In higher ed, we often stick with our own peeps — in Admissions, in Student Affairs, in Communications, in IT — because it’s certainly easier. But without listening for the big picture, as messy and uncomfortable as it can be, how can we make decisions that serve our students and faculty?

2. Leaders lead. After receiving as many opinions as possible — after taking his time and weighing all the arguments — Washington would make a decision and confidently stick to it, inspiring and focusing those around him to the task at hand. From the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse to Alexander Hamilton’s first bank bill, Washington supported his subordinates against swirling controversy and the buck stopped with him. And though he failed to take a lead in ending slavery, he did make the decision to free his slaves in his will — something that none of the other slave-owning founding fathers did. In higher education, the focus on consensus and process can make it seem as if no one is in charge, that no one is accountable. At the end of the day, someone’s gotta make a decision.

3. The non-traditional student is usually the smartest person in the room. Alone among the founding fathers, Washington had not attended college. He felt his lack of education keenly. In early writings, he adopted a highfalutin style that he thought sounded more “educated.” In gatherings, he tended to just stay quiet while orators like John Adams or Richard Henry Lee took the floor. Later in his career, Washington found the fact that people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison underestimated him useful. Washington was a life-long learner. One of the great advantages to working in higher ed is that you are surrounded by an organizational culture that values learning. Why not take advantage of that every day?

4. Leading is hard. Finally, over and over again, Washington lifted the weight of the country on his shoulders, at huge personal sacrifice: commander in chief of the Continental Army, president of the Constitutional Convention, president of the United States — twice. He didn’t want any of these positions, but he also knew that if he did not take up the challenge, the things he wanted to see happen for his country would not happen. It’s not easy, but if you aren’t going to push and push and champion your own goals or vision, who will?

–lori.

Adventures in Livestreaming: Chapter 1

February 16, 2012 higher education 5 comments

An occasional series in which I fumble my way the world of live-event coverage. I screw up so you don’t have to.

My golden nugget of fried gold from HighEdWeb 2011 was this, courtesy of rockstar niceguy and caffeine connoiseur Seth O’Dell: If you are not livestreaming your events, you do not care about your community. All it takes is one person, one laptop, and one camera.

With those words ringing like a Buddhist sutra in my ears, I’ve set about trying to bring real-time event coverage to our campus this year. My immodest goal: make livestreaming of guest speakers, panels, and performances an expectation and not an exception. When someone hears that an event is *not* going to be livestreamed, I want them to be disappointed.

So far this year, I’ve livestreamed two events and have three more coming up. Each time I’m learning something new, something I think I’ll do differently the next time around. Let’s start at the beginning:

Livestreaming Rule #1:
The Cake Is A Lie (well, at least a fib)

Seth is an inspiration and a giant amongst mortals, but his “One person, one laptop, one camera” philosophy is akin to the coach in Bull Durham saying, “You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.” He ain’t lying, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

The very first event I livestreamed did in fact involve one person (me), one laptop (and old MacBook Pro I use as a Safari test machine) and one camera (an even older Sony Handycam of the kind your dad took on vacation to Washington’s Crossing in 2002).

And it did in fact work. The event was a hastily convened ceremony for our YellowJackets a cappella ensemble who were being presented with a key to the city. It was in a huge room with bad acoustics and there was no podium mic or sound system. I just used the built-in mic on the camera to pick up the sound in the room. We ended up with 48 viewers for a webcast that was only promoted about a half an hour before it began with a homepage, Facebook, and Twitter posting.

So as a proof of concept, I’d call this one a success. With lots of research and several test runs, even a clueless neophyte like me was able to pull off a live webcast that did not crash and burn midway through. One-person-one-laptop-one-camera does work. However, both the person, the laptop, and the camera in this scenario left something to be desired. As a result, the final product did leave lots of room for improvement on both the technical quality side (especially audio), the skills side (especially me) and on the promotional side.

Things can only get better from here — stay tuned for our next exciting episode!

–lori

PS — for those interested, here are some of the specifics on the equipment used on this event.

EVENT: YellowJackets Key To the City

Platform: Livestream; used their Livestream Studio Web-based interface
Camera: Sony Handycam DCR-HC90 (don’t think they make ‘em anymore)
Mic: Camera built-in
Laptop: Macbook Pro (late 2006 model; this caused a last minute scramble to find a Firewire 800 to Firewire 400 adapter for the laptop’s older Firewire input)
Tripod

The Goddess Watches the Iowa Caucus Results (so you don’t have to)

January 4, 2012 politics No comments

I fell asleep before the final votes were in, but here is how the Iowa caucus played out in my little corner of this beacon of freedom Rick Perry calls, “‘Merka.”

Goddess Redux 2008: The Goddess Explains the Iowa Caucuses

January 3, 2012 politics One comment

NOTE: This blog post originally ran on January 3, 2008.

The Iowa caucuses begin in just over an hour, and already the talking heads on CNN are creaming their pants waiting for the returns to start coming in. I’m worried.

I’m not worried about any particular result. I’m worried about the media coverage. The journalists and pundits covering this campaign haven’t had anything real to talk about for more than a year. They are like racehorses trapped in the starting gate, straining for the finish line. The language is already scary: “It finally begins!” “It’s a day that’s been circled on political calendars for months.” “It could be anyone’s game and in a few hours we’ll finally know who emerges as the winner in Iowa.” As a result of all this pent-up media energy, a completely ridiculous system involving around 200,000 corn farmers will be blown totally out of proportion.

So just what is a caucus, anyway? The mainstream media have been doing these “So just what is a caucus, anyway?” pieces all week, but they are always done with this “aw, shucks” undertone. “Aw, those cute Iowans, meeting in each others living rooms, bringing cookies and pie and talking to their neighbors about politics. That’s the stuff of democracy.” The BBC America reporters covering the caucuses seem to get particularly swept away with the heady romance of good ol’ fashioned USA democracy in action.

But the Iowa caucuses have a dirty little secret: hardly anyone participates. Part of the romance around the early electoral states of Iowa and New Hampshire is that the people in these small, unrepresentative states take their duty seriously and are really engaged in the process. In Iowa, it turns out that’s just not true. Two million of Iowa’s 3 million residents are registered to vote, and of those only 150,000 Democrats and 80,000 Republicans are expected to participate in caucuses. That’s only about 12 percent of registered voters. So much for participation.

There are other issues with the Iowa caucuses that make them less the bastion of participatory democracy that they are portrayed to be.

The caucuses begin at 7pm sharp. If you can’t be there at 7pm, you can’t participate. So anyone who has to work at 7pm (oh, let’s say nurses, police officers, bar and restaurant waitstaff, couples who can’t get a babysitter, the babysitters of couples who could get a babysitter, etc.) are left out in the Iowa cold.
When you attend a caucus, you are asked to publicly choose which candidate you prefer, usually by physically moving to a certain area of the room. If your candidate does not garner 15 percent of the participants in his or her corner, you can either leave or move to one of the other groups. It is this “neighbors persuading neighbors” bit that’s always romanticized by the pundits, but what if one of the people doing the persuading is your boss? Or your minister? Or a party activist, promising you a spot at the state’s convention delegation if you come over to their side?
Those initial counts — when everyone first says who they support — are not reported to anyone ever. It’s therefore possible for a candidate to come in third or fourth in the preferences of participants overall without anyone ever knowing it. For example, if you attend a caucus of 60 people a candidate must get at least nine supporters to be considered “viable.” So if six people support Dennis Kucinich, 27 people support Barack Obama, and 27 people support John Edwards, those six people in Kucinich’s corner will be asked to support another candidate. The fact that they initially supported Kucinich is never known by anyone. Multiply that across the 1,781 precincts in Iowa, and you’ll never know how many people in Iowa actually thought Dennis Kucinich would make a good Democratic presidential nominee.
Forgetting all that nonsense for a moment, even after the Kucinich supporters in our example above move on to support, say, Obama, those vote totals are not reported either! So if there are 60 people in that room, the result coming out of that precinct is not “Obama: 33, Edwards: 27.” Those totals are plugged into a mathematical formula that no one ever explains! except to say “it’s reaaaallly complicated, Wolf!” That formula decides how many state delegates each of the two candidates in our scenario will receive (not national convention delegates; those are different). Our hypothetical precinct might have only three or four delegates, and that’s the only number that counts in the end of this “democratic” process.

My rule of thumb: if a system requires this much explanation, it’s probably not that good.

–lori

UPDATE: My mistake above. My post from 2008 was referencing the Democratic caucus rules. The GOP caucuses work differently. They do have a secret ballot, and there is only one vote with those raw vote tallies counted and reported. I was right about the participation rates though; they are abysmal.

Post-HighEdWeb Resolutions

October 31, 2011 higher education No comments

I played guitar on a stage in Austin, so HighEdWeb 2011 has already given me a moment to check off the old Life List. But as I settle back in to work on Monday, the strains of furry karaoke still ringing in my ears, there are three resolutions I take back with me to tackle before the next HighEdWeb conference in Milwaukee in 2012.

1.) Make live-campus event coverage a reality. And then make it an expectation. The first thing I did when I got back to Rochester was talk to my boss about Seth O’Dell’s red stapler-winning presentation on live-event coverage. And to my boss’s credit, he gets it, and agrees that we should be doing this. But the problem is one that Seth articulated: there is no one who’s job this is right now. Well now it’s my job. Or at least it’s my job to figure out whose job it is. Because as Seth said, “If you are not livestreaming your events, you don’t care about your community.” It is that important.

(Of course, the next logical question is, if you are streaming your guest speakers, why not livestream your classes? And that’s where the conversation gets really interesting.)

2.) Introduce some real project management up in here! Right now, my main project management tool is my inbox, and most of my deadlines are “as soon as possible” or “when you get a chance.” This is not good. Alana Riley’s session on leading successful projects was packed full of so many tools and resources. She almost made project management seem easy. Almost. Easy enough for me to give it a try, anyway.

3.) Stay positive and get out of my own way. This is a tough one. As I stare at the aforementioned inbox, I have 434 unread email messages from my week away in Austin. The post-heweb glow usually lasts about a week or so before I feel myself slowing sinking back under that weight. But as Dan Frommelt said in his presentation on project management by Attila the Hun, “You can laugh or you can cry. And one of these is dignified.” I usually am a pretty positive person around the office, I think. But I do allow myself to get overwhelmed by events. This year, in an attempt to save my sanity, I resolve to say “no” more often (see Fran Zablocki’s post “It’s All Your Perfect Little Fault” because I can’t put it any better than this) and finally, to quote from Karlyn Morisette’s red-stapler winning session, I resolve to get out of my own way, and to not let the myriad little things distract me from the big, important things.

See you in Milwuakee — stay HighEdWeb, my friends (shout out to Mark Greenfield!)

–lori

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