EdStreamTV is going live!
It’s no secret that I think streaming video is going to be huge at NECC. I’ve already blogged about it once. A thread that I started on the NECC Ning site caused some major conversation. This led to an ISTE proclamation that sent ripples throughout the EduBlogosphere and led to a quick retraction by the conference organizers.
Without a doubt, video streaming is going to be major at the conference this year and the real challenge is figuring out where it’s all happening at. Many will be announced on Twitter, but it quickly became apparent that more organization was going to be needed. Will and I have had several conversations on the topic and have decided to create EdStreamTV.
What is EdStreamTV? It’s a television channel created by Mogulus that we will use to be the live video home for streaming video at NECC. Think of it as NECC TV, complete with live coverage, repeats of presentations, and an on demand library of content available to be watched at any time.
We recognize that different people are going to use different sites to broadcast at NECC. Mogulus will let us pull them all in together. It can handle live feeds, even from multiple cameras and mobile devices. It can import in videos of many different formats. It can import in YouTube videos, videos from uStream, and many other sites as well. It can be embedded, has built in chat, and even has a slick little ticker along the bottom that will pull in blog posts about NECC!
We want you to participate! This could be a fantastic way to share the conference virtually, as well as benefit from it long after the conference doors have closed. There are several aspects to the project, and many ways to contribute.
Prior to the conference: You can create a short (30-60 seconds) video promo for the things you’ll be doing at NECC. Presenting? Hosting a workshop? Live blogging? Conducting interviews? Let the world know what you’re going to be up to. Create a short video and tag it with neccstream08 and we’ll add it to EdStreamTV. You can upload it to YouTube and tag it there. You can record it in uStream and tag it there. You can host it on your own blog and tag it there. Create it and tag it, and we’ll be sure to include it in the channel. You can find more details about this here.
At NECC
Streaming Live on your own site: If you’re going to be streaming out a presentation, let the world know what you’ll be sharing, when it is and where they can catch it. You can log what you’ll be streaming live on this page of the wiki so that people can plan accordingly. If you see somebody else already streaming the same session you were planning to, please be considerate of bandwidth and refrain from doubling up. Or contact them directly and coordinate your efforts.
Streaming Live on EdStreamTV: If you’d like to stream out a session live on EdStreamTV, simply contact email@edstream.tv and we’ll register you as a camera person for the channel and coordinate the timing. You will to stream it live via Mogulus though, as we can’t display live feeds from other sites in real time.
Sharing archives, videos, interviews and more: If you have streamed a session and want to include it in the EdStreamTV channel, simply post it on your own site with the tag neccstream08 OR email us at email@edstream.tv with all the details. You can find instructions for several of the more common sites here. Once you submit your videos, it will go into the EdStreamTV loop and repeated regularly throughout the day and will also be available in the On Demand library.
Bloggers Cafe: We will be using the Bloggers Cafe as sort of a home base for the channel. Expect to see live interviews, impromptu events and broadcasts of various happenings throughout the conference. Stop by if you’d like to join in!
We hope that this becomes an integral part of the conference experience, both live and virtual. We look forward to having you join us in this groundbreaking experience!
Captcha 2.0: Cats, Dogs and eBooks, oh my!
What do cats, dogs, and eBooks have in common? They can all help in the war against spam! Yes, it sounds strange, but I’m not kidding. Got two tools for you bloggers out there to consider adding to your blogs.
Most people know what Captcha is. Well, most people know what it does. It stands for, “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” (thanks Wikipedia!) Essentially, it is a test to prove that the person signing up or posting the content is an actual human being and not some spam loving computer program. It does this by asking the human to identify something that a machine simply couldn’t do. For example, it might ask you to identify what letters appear in a twisted, stretched out graphic image.
Collectively, millions of captcha forms are being entered every day. A few clever people have tried to figure out how to harness that collective ‘manpower’ and use it for the forces of good and decency.
The first site to do this is reCaptcha. The only difference between a regular Captcha and a reCaptcha is that reCaptcha has you identify TWO words. One word it already knows and uses as verification. The other word actually comes from a scan of an eBook, and the computer can’t figure out what it is. So it’s relying on humans to take a look and type in what they think it is. If enough people all agree on what the word should be, then it makes a match! So every time you type in two words to confirm your comment, you’re actually using one word as verification, and supplying the reCaptcha project with information about another word the computers can’t figure out. So by posting comments to blogs, you can help the Internet Archive increase the accuracy of its scans. You can read more about the process here. reCaptcha is available for many platforms, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, MediaWiki and Movable Type.
The second method is called Assira, and it’s all about clicking on cute little pictures of cats and dogs. You and I can look at a picture of an animal, and it’ll take less than a second for us to determine whether we’re looking at a cat or a dog. However, a computer can analyze that data from here to eternity and still have trouble figuring it out. Well, some people over at Microsoft are partnering with Petfinder to create a very unique Captcha type device. It’ll show you 10 animals, and ask you to click on the cats. Takes about 2 seconds to do, and yet when you click submit you’re helping Petfinder classify a few of the 3 million photos of stray animals so they can try to find homes for them. Of course, you can adopt any of the pets that you see as well! And who doesn’t like looking at cute pictures of cats and dogs?
Personally, I’m thinking that I’m going to add reCaptcha to my blog once I can get a theme issue fixed. While I love the cats and dogs, it seems to take up a lot of space. Plus, I like the idea of helping out Internet Archive. They do some great work over there. But they’re both definitely worthy causes!
Tuesdays with Tarski
Trying out yet another theme today, and I’m definitely digging this one. It’s called Tarski, and it’s described by its authors as:
Flexible and customisable, Tarski was created with blog authors in mind: it’s easy to install and personalise. However, Tarski is also highly extensible and employs a number of innovative features which the more technically-minded can take advantage of. Its clean and well-documented code provides an excellent basis for more extensive modifications.
I do have to admit, there’s quite a few features, and its certainly a theme that I could grow into well. There’s several pieces of it that I’m not using yet. I’m not thrilled with this particular banner (stolen from my old theme), but I had to put something there so I guess it’ll work.
One other thing, it employs something called “Asides“, which are essentially mini posts that don’t even get their own title in the timeline. I’m going to give them a try and see how I like them. May be a good way to clear out the bazillions of tabs I have open in my browser.
Themes, themes and more themes
Now that the blog has been upgraded to the latest and greatest version of WordPress, I’m trying out a few new looks for it. So if you only read the blog in your aggregator, do me a favor by clicking through and letting me know what you think.
Just about all of the themes that I’m using support WordPress Widgets. I’m tired of modifying my sidebar whenever I want to try out a new widget, this will let me key in on specific blocks within it. It will also give me a lot more flexibility to bounce between 2 and 3 column layouts with ease.
Today’s theme is Durable WR, which is a widgets ready version of the award winning Durable theme. It features an extremely dynamic nav bar, and is 100% customizable by visitors. So if you don’t like the colors I’ve got on Teach42, you can go ahead and change them any way you want! It also displays the current blog post more prominently than older posts by having older posts split amongst two columns, and the current post spanning them. I think it’s pretty slick and may very well be a keeper. But I’ll definitely try a few others first.
Love to hear what you think.