Opening Up Events: Technology Trends and Courage to Adapt

This 2-hour event, Technology Trends and Courage to Adapt, facilitated by Tony Bates and Gary Poole was held yesterday at Vancouver Community College in Vancouver, British Columbia. The organizers connected with the Professional Learning team at BCcampus to see about helping to open up the event to the outside world. We jump at any chance to experiment, so of course we said yes!

We looked into costs for streaming the event -- the high quality route -- and decided we weren't able to go down that path. The VCC Centre for Instructional Development would be video recording the event for later viewing, but we wanted something to do something LIVE. Robin Popow, Leva Lee, along with (amazing) SFU co-op students Diana Chan, Hilda Anggraeni, and Heather Kincaid, came up with a plan:

Before the event

1. Announce the event on the Opening Education blog
2. Circulate the announcement using a variety of channels (email, Twitter)
3. Decide on a hashtag that is not currently being used #techcourage
4. Contact people with DS106radio experience to see what steps we need to take to broadcast the event
5. Determine what equipment/software to use and where it will be placed (Ask: Will the speakers be moving around a lot? Can you monitor the broadcast where it is placed? )

During the event

1. Have one person responsible for broadcasting the event via DS106radio 
2. Take photographs and post them via Twitter, or later somewhere else
3. Designate a couple people to tweet, using #techcourage and also #openinged and #ds106radio as appropriate
4. Follow the twitter stream for any alerts that the broadcast isn't working, or links are broken, and all the other usual stuff that goes awry!

After the event

1. Storify the event
2. Blog about it

I participated from my home office and the others were on site. From my end I had difficulties with the broadcast. Others reported that they shared my "chipmunk" experience, yet it seemed to work fine for the rest. Overall I think a radio broadcast combined with sharing of images and highlights through twitter is an excellent low budget way to open up an event to the rest of the world. Better than low quality streaming? Probably! 

Diana Chan created this storify and wrote this blog post (to come soon!) from the participant's perspective.  I gathered together the artefacts into a different storify below because I wanted to include everything so it could be reviewed as a process.