Last night Ben Harwood and Ben Rimes joined me to put on a DS106/MagicMacguffin Radio Campfire. We were graced with stories and songs that helped us enjoy our time.
The appeal of Internet Radio is unexpected. I previously hosted a podcast and blog about the doctoral process, so the notion of my voice on the Internet isn’t foreign to me. Being live, though, that was something entirely different.
How did this come to pass?
You’ll remember, that I represented my DS106/Magic Macguffin team’s radio stories a few weeks back with a Zombie Underground Radio themed show. The show was done in a few steps.
- Alan Levine (@cogdog) setup the live stream on DS106 Radio using quite an elaborate setup.
- Called me via Skype
- Played the uploaded recording while we were on Skype together
- Interviewed me live via Skype on DS106 Radio before and after the recording aired
It was a unique experience and one that I hadn’t expected to capture my interest.
Then last week,
Martha Burtis (
@mburtis) hosted radio panel using a similar setup but substituting
TeamSpeak for Skype. This change allowed DS106ers to enjoy a live panel discussion about the strange goings on at Camp Magic MacGuffin. I adopted my alter ego (
@theunclehector) and joined some other characters on the show to uncover just what was happening at camp.
This, again, was a unique experience for me and it inspired my next step which was to host a live show on DS106 Radio without on air support from the cadre of expert instructors in DS106/Magic MacGuffin.
So, the idea of having a campfire/pow-wow on the radio was born. I needed some participants who would be willing to pull up a log and weave us a tale befitting a campfire scene. Two Open Online DS106ers answered the call.
- Ben Harwood (@benjaminharwood) – who told us some personal experiences about his travels and various run-ins with interesting characters.
- Ben Rimes (@techsavvyed) – who told us a story about his travel overseas and spectacular experience with fireworks and pyrotechnics
Intermixed in the stories we threw in some campfire songs. Interestingly, our listeners joined in on Twitter with the sing-a-long. The audience made the whole experience even more lively and enjoyable.
The Bens and I came together to make a radio experience for ourselves and the class. It was terrific playing off each other and chatting around our campfire. I always expect wondrous things to occur when educational technologists come together. We are the best kind of nerds, in my opinion.
I didn’t expect how Internet Radio would capture my attention but it truly sparked some thinking about how live interaction and play can generate a community (of any kind really but) of learning in an online course. Opening the airwaves for student, faculty, learner, lurker interplay allows us to give a voice to the class and encourage some different experiences.
This gives rise to how Internet Radio, like DS106 Radio, can be used in all of education. The cost of Internet Radio is nominal unless you opt for a hosting service and higher than needed bit rate, which makes it a viable tool for educational environments. This gets even cheaper if you can re-purpose an internal server for your radio station. Infrastructure.
Now we need some ideas on how to use it. Well, auto-dj is one way to use it and that gives a nice connection throughout a course or set of courses. As DS106 is teaching us, though, live radio is the real magic where unicorns and rainbows meet learning and where real education can take place. Where students, faculty, and administrators can come and interact with the outcome being fun, learning, and excitement for the community.
Ideas could include the basic, and much beloved, college radio stations which are becoming defunct as traditional radio broadcasts to course specific streams broadcasting content to the masses.
It so happened that I was approached by a faculty member about creating some digital humanities experiences centered around the upcoming 2012 election. As part of our thinking, I am forwarding the idea of an Internet Radio series that will host panels, discussions, debates, stories, exposes, etc from our faculty, students, and administrators. Giving students a live voice is where we can propel their thinking beyond the rote to the higher order stuff we really enjoy.
