First Word:
broadcasttasticThe first question: What is mobile broadcasting all about?
As a followup to a meeting with a faculty member, I found myself looking into live streaming tools. “Oh, you mean like Adobe Connect?” you might have heard yourself ask in your head. To which I would reply “yes, if Adobe Connect was mobile, more scalable, had better social tools and was designed for young people who hate powerpoint”.
Live streaming is all about broadcasting live video of you (or what you are experiencing) in the moment, to the world. From your phone. For free.
There are a number of tools out there, including the highly publicized Meerkat and Periscope, as well as YouNow and UStream among others, but for today we’re going to look at a tool thats been around a bit longer – LiveStream.
Video chat, the likes of which you might find in tools like Skype or Facetime, is a two way video feed between you and the person (or perhaps small group of people) you want to talk to. Video chat is (virtual) face to face. Live streams on the other hand only send video one way – from you to the world. But the lack of two way video communication is not to say that streams are un-social, rather they are just social at scale. When you broadcast a stream, you can send it to your twitter followers, your facebook friends, you can text it to people, or old school email it out to others and they can communicate back to you, live via chat. Instead of 1 to 1 communication, streaming is about 1 to many. Or put another way, streaming is more like a television broadcast – video chat is closer to a phone call.
Step Into A World: Zac Zidik explores a virtual classroom environment using the Oculus
What do YOU think?
Interested? Skeptical? Curious? Want to try it on for yourself?
LearnFirst was developed by Teaching
and Learning with Technology (TLT)
in support of
