I’m in the late middle of a sheer mad but insanely fun series of events for OE Global’s Open Education Week. That itself is a post or more, with the set up and development of the WordPress web site, an Events calendar plugin, fediversing the events… oh, stop it!
But also, I have had to scan and manually update many of the submitted events, now closing in on 300 on the schedule.
This is about the series of live streamed sessions I am doing under the banner of “OEWeek Live” yep 15 of them. These are done via Streamyard that goes directly to YouTube (beauty, the stream link instantly is the archive link), I find and hopefully others do, that its a bit of a fresh break from the monotony of zoom boxes.
I had big dreams to get this out before monday, but, well you know the thing about Good Blog Intentions
Huh? I will try to blather what we are doing, but see this one from yesterday:
The Complex Format
There is almost an AI like compelxi– nah, the complexity of the format is this. I invite a variety of interesting people, they do an introduction, and then take turns talking about a project they are doing, an issue that is troubling them, an idea they have, or just what they had for lunch (just kidding, that was what we once did in a platform that is dead to me).
While I may have baffled my colleagues and a lot of people with the pitch, I try to frame it like meeting people at a conference or a meeting, or just gather at a cafe where you may or may not know each other, and have open conversations. Like who shows up for coffee with a bullet list outline of your conversation topics in advance? Or who has to meet the day before to rehearse your conversation?
I have been lucky that my organization has let me do this for the past two years, and it’s almost magic sometimes how it works, especially when you have people with different interests or roles. It’s never lacked for conversation.
The Pseudo Mechanics
First is just some guessing for some regular slots to set up sessions each day, I usually aim for two that are my mid morning (works for North America and late afternoon in Europe) and a second one in my mid afternoon, it might make it early in the next day for Asia/Australia. I have typically done extra ones a few in my night hours to fit guests from India.
So I have a starting planning list I set up in a doc, with lists for the up to 9 people I can invite as guests, set up some preset links for time conversion, using UTC for reference times. I slap together a Google Form where people can indicate interests and also check which of the slots might work for them (with all the links to easily convert times).
Then I just send ’em out, to people who did these before, folks I think might be interested. The wild thing is almost everyone signs up! I then try to assign them to slots, sometimes by interest but more just to get a good distribution.
I typically end up with a few special slots that I don’t send folks to, so there is either the wide open conversation format, or something with maybe a theme or special guest list. For the latter this year I had certain folks that fit well for the Opening Launch on Monday, a session on that topic that has two letters, the first one an “A”, one yesterday I added on the fly because the folks from Equity Unbound had a group lined up (and also, because it’s Maha;-) one early today as a Call in Show for Tricky CC Questions, and there is a University of Leeds student panel on AI set up Friday.
The prep is setting up the sessions in Streamyard, sending calendar invites with all the join details, creating event pages on OEWeek, putting them into the OEG Connect community space. Usually in the phase where I get to the studio early, I am pulling URLs to put on screen/in chat or setting up a window of browser tabs to share.
Going Unstructured
I am very comfortable winging it on the fly, and frankly I find being less rehearsed and “proper” hopefully comes across as human. This is all rooted in the formative years of DS106 especially DS106 Radio when we would do ad-hoc live broadcasts from a class at UMW or do on official streams from conference sessions.
Jim Groom always described the energy of DS106 as having this element of “eventness” and going “live” on the air, even if you knew you had the typical Zero Listener audience creates a sense of energy in the participants. That was felt to in the years of doing — OMG I am forgetting Another Dead Google tool– Hangouts?– like for Virtually Connecting. And what Mia Zamora and I did for Networked Narratives, we called them Studio Visits, where rather then invitees coming to our classroom, we made it feel like we went to the creative spaces of our guests.
The response from the people who have been on– so far it will be 57– has been very positive too. With all the meetings we fill schedules with, and online webinars, how often are we able just to sit and have open conversation with colleagues at a distance? My interest int doing this is (a) it is fun (b) it’s more my style than orchestrated and (c) I general find presentations via zoom the death knell of dull. If someone is speaking to me stuff I can read on a web page, why am I sitting there?
There is one other interesting thing I have noted. Our live audiences are pretty small. A “big” one is 20, often it is 3 or 4, and a few I have done have 0. Sometimes the counter just flicks up and down quickly. I do acknowledge and have been told more people watch later than live. But even with those numbers, I am by no means even registering in the bottom scale of anything worth bragging about for reach.
But I am not in this for the numbers or analytics I can prop on a report. I am in for the excitement and activity in the discussion room. That’s where the action is at.
I had hope tio write more coherent thoughts… but I have to go prepare for a next session! Follow the full schedule on the OEWeek events site https://oeweek.oeglobal.org/series/oe-week-live/.
Gotta go live!
Featured Image: Spotted in the streets of Melbourne– For the Next Time I Run a Live Event flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
I’m hoping for at least one attendee on my first live stream tomorrow, if we can get it working. Either way it will be an Open Education (Week) experience! And I’ll get an audio file to create a podcast episode.