 Hi, my name is Mikhail Grosjevich, I direct the Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York System, CUNY. And for the last several months I've been playing around with the technology that was new to me, but it's been around for a while. And we're starting to figure out ways in which we can use this to engage our students. So we just kind of give you the sense of what we're going to do and then we'll get moving. We're going to talk a little bit about webcasting via ICAST, live broadcasting as well as as programmed radio programs. And then we'll talk a little bit about the implications for teaching and learning and then give you a sense of how it's done, the technology behind it, and play around with some of the ideas that this has guided us to play around with. We don't have a lot of time, so what we figure we do is just kind of give you guys an introduction and then engage you in a conversation about it in a while. We want to make sure that we have time to talk. So what is DS106 radio? DS106 radio is a community web radio station that got thrown together essentially by chance. It was a part of a course called DS106, which was originally taught by Jim Groom at the University of Washington in Virginia. And one point, Graham Potter, who's here with us, said how about a radio station? Jim said great, let's do it. And next thing you know, we have 20-something contributors broadcasting live from conferences from their backyards in Australia, listening to Chiketa's from Tokyo, all over the place. So we've had broadcasters literally all over the globe. One of the things that really strikes me about this, this is a tweet by a teacher in Coquitum outside of Vancouver in British Columbia. Graham and Brian Jackson. Brian Jackson teaches a gifted program, a music program there in British Columbia. And they had the spring concert last spring that they were able to stream using this technology to literally listeners all over the world. And this captures for me the essence of the pedagogical implications of live radio. Is that with a laptop and a microphone, they were able to not only record the concert, there's no chance to record the concert all over the school, and then to broadcast it live. One of the issues around this that I find interesting is that, and this is a side note, is that the reason that Brian was able to do this was because he was able to experiment with this technology on his school-issued laptop simply because someone two years ago gave him the admin password to his machine. And because he had that, he was able to experiment and play around and was able to broadcast this concert live and so much to the joy of students and parents and administrators. So, one of the ways that we've been thinking about using web radio for teaching and learning, and we're talking more about this, is that I direct the communication program. And so what we do is we try to get students to imagine themselves as speakers, as writers, as readers, as communicating with an audience and assuming a particular role. And one of the things that I noticed playing around with the radio is, just with a phone, I can come up to someone and say, you lie on the radio. And immediately, their whole sort of demeanor changes, and they imagine themselves as mass communicators, right? They now are playing the role of a radio broadcaster, and they're communicating to an audience. And this is very, very, very powerful, and this is one of the things that we want to play around with with this technology. There are other implications as well that we'll get into. Jim, do you want to add? Well, one of the things that's interesting is, hey, this creator right here was designed by a student in DS106, right? Now, one of the things that you have to think about with DS106 radio is this is happening as an experiment, as a class is going on. So week two, I throw out a tweet to Ryan Lam, like, you know what? Screw Illuminate, screw the whole Blackboard empire. What we need is we need something free and open that we can experiment with and kind of imagine the way we share in a class, an online class, and an open online class differently. Well, within a week, Grant Potter had created an open system for Web Radio using IceCast that anyone could kind of not only drop files off with using Dropbox, but also as we iterated over the semester, people could actually intervene in the stream and start broadcasting from wherever they were. So there's something called NiceCast, something called LadioCast, or LadioCast, depending on how you do it, something called WinEd or PC, you could actually become a DJ from your living room or from your backyard. And it's interesting, like the Mobile Revolution, we say in education, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, they didn't really strike me as coming until I realized that someone in Australia had their cell phone and they were in their backyard broadcasting saying, look, listen to the Chicago's, you know, it's January in Australia. And it might sound stupid, but it blew my mind. The idea that now field reports and the idea that we can access the wider world through something that every technology has. Now, go beyond that to the next level, right? And you start seeing that we have the ability to not only do it from our cell phones, from our smart phones, but now from a pay phone in North America. So we've been playing around with this, and Brett Potter set this all up, is the idea that you can dial 1-88 number in New York City or in Utah and be immediately on the radio station. How trippy is that to kind of re-engineer and rethink old technology in a new way? Stephen Johnson, who wrote the book Where Good Ideas Come From, I sort of recently talked at a conference in New York City, and he basically said, you know, this idea, and it's a very good idea, is let's not try to kind of rethink the model, let's not try to reinvent everything from scratch. Someone said it earlier in the session. Let's take old technology and reimagine what it's doing. And Grant Pond is amazing in this regard because he's taken an old technology like Web Radio and reimagined it as a platform for teaching, learning, and sharing that gets us outside of what seems to be the prison house of these presentation programs like Illuminate, Adobe Presenter, etc. So, Grant, I don't know if you have some of that audio. He's now in the conference. What I'm guessing was... C.S. Moser's radio, another text from... So what I'm doing here is I set this up so that potentially a student wouldn't need to have an $800 device or carry a laptop with them, or worry about power or worry about spending money to tell their story. They could go out into their lived environment and use whatever technology is available on the street in order to get their word out. Now the interesting thing about this is because we've added some extensions to this telephony system so that students could collaborate. So while I was on the line in the East Village, I'm giving my tour to Iowa in New York City. But at one point... So what you heard there is Alan was listening to this broadcast from a phone and he said, oh, Grant's on the line. He can call in to this branch exchange and start talking with me. So, I mean, in this sense, we're just playing with it. We're experimenting and pushing what we can do with telephony and broadcast radio. But what's really interesting is you can imagine that as, you know, put that in the hands of students. Go out to an event. Go out to a protest. Go out to, you know, on the weekend and collect audio from your living environment and build a story. You know, and build some narrative. So it provides them some very inexpensive technologies to do this. And then using Twitter, using different communication tools outside of that audio sphere, students can get feedback right away. Well, one good tip by that. I'm from Canada. I have no data plan in the United States. I'm broadcasting, you know, what my travel plans are. Alan calls in and says, oh, if you go up to Washington Square, you can get free Wi-Fi. So not only, I'm learning things about my immediate environment just by sort of, you know, calling in. But anyway, that's my spiel on the telephony part and how it could be used for students. Yeah, that's interesting, too, because if this was a six radio, one of the things that it came out was the class comes experimenting with students creating things. So one of the things that happened when this emerged is students started creating, I think, kind of interesting things based on a particular aesthetic. For example, we have a student in DS106 at the University of Mary Washington who created, let me just find this real quick, who created one of my favorite little bits and they would actually create bumpers. So check this out. Let me see if I can find it. I have it somewhere. Let me just, yes. Listen to this. I know that you're listening. Are you listening? The fact that this student is kind of intervening in the culture that we hear on the radio and bringing it into class and producing something, but also producing an aesthetic, not only for a class, but for what seems like a community that's emerging. Because many of the people who used DS106 radio had nothing to do with the class. They didn't because so much of the class was kind of run through Twitter with a hashtag, hash DS106 radio and people would follow that and get on. So you have 20, 30 DJs, maybe two or three, four of them were part of the class, the rest is just this community that emerged through Twitter and is actually making a radio station and programming as it goes and it's completely free for them. There's no kind of logic to it. It just happened and emerges. Now the question is, and this is kind of, and I hope he speaks on this more, is the idea that what the LMS, blogging was to the LMS, I think DS106 radio or something like it, because the same thing as experimenting now with TV is to these kind of presentation programs like Illuminate and Adobe Connect. They're these open spaces that we can occupy and share in different ways. And so that kind of connection that Brian made is important to me because what we're not doing is like Illuminate and Adobe Connect and all these other tools is kind of happening out in the open in a space like this. And how could this be a new way for a university or a college to imagine yet another media platform from which to broadcast to? What if every class across disciplines integrated audio assignments that were actually real life? That you could program a university radio station or TV station which is actually regularly programmed by the student as producer. By the student is creating something that we can share. It's a completely different look at a model that universities need to be proactive. We heard some questions about innovation earlier, but it was innovation all in regards to money. This is innovation in regards to teaching and learning. This is innovation of what you do in the class, reverberates beyond that, and what we do as public institutions, reverberates beyond that. We build things, we make things so that they can be shared openly and widely. That's why we're publicly funded, I hope. And so this is a broadcast medium and platform through which to do it, right? We don't help them right now. We've been doing it with publishing to some degree using blogging platforms, etc. But what about audio, what about video? Where are we doing that? Well, I think what's happening here is it seems like a lot of fun and, okay, great, the little Lady Gaga bumper. But it's something more than that. We get thousands of students programming something that becomes a regular kind of, I think, resource for not only a community, but potentially beyond that community. We just haven't made that jump, but I think it's ready to be made. Well, yeah, maybe just to draw that out a little bit, the thing that's really important to remember about DS106, and we've done a few presentations now at different things, and I feel like there's an essential point that we obviously haven't communicated to people because I think people think, A, I'm glad Jim already said, you don't have to be a part of DS106 radio to participate in it. All the codes are available, all the passwords, the passwords are always DS106, by the way. I mean, it's astonishing to me that somebody who doesn't hate Jim's guts, and I do know they exist, hasn't just decided to bring the station down out of spite because it'd be trivially easy to do, and maybe I shouldn't be saying that to this particular crowd. But the fact is, yeah, so you've got this thing that's completely emerging, but yeah, the message that comes out of this, first of all, you don't have to be part of the DS106 universe, and the wild thing is, is how many of the people that have found their way to this station have just completely unique sensibilities. The dude in New Zealand who puts together a playlist of Dr. John while he's cooking in New Zealand, which comes through at like 3 in the morning if you happen to be up over here. Maybe we'll play a little audio of Scott Lowe from Japan. There's this incredibly slick DJ. He was actually on the air when they had the major earthquake last year, and we've gotten to know him through the station, and of course, the way of ridiculous things was an event like that happened. You immediately start to think of your friends and people you know in these places. Are they okay? We're hearing from them immediately. I don't know if you want to just play a few seconds of that. I was here alone, and stuff was falling from the shelves. Making a lot of noise. It started small. There was a construction site next to where we live, and I actually thought it was for heavy machinery from the construction. Then I was going to be flipping when I broke the earthquake, as I had a small earthquake hitting Japan. But then the sucker went on for about 90 seconds, two minutes, and it was really weird. Ever since then it has just continued to wobble with some very solid aftershocks. Tokyo, as far as I can tell, it's not hit hard all the way. Here are emergency sirens in the background. NHK television showed scenes of fire from somewhere in the city of Tokyo. The biggest damage that I've seen on the television reported in northeast Japan. Just gives you a sense of the kind of stuff that happens, and we all do this in our lives, and it's amazing too when you start to realize that by pushing a button on your phone, and this is even before Grant set up the public phone thing, but just on your iPhone, your Android phone, or whatever, pushing a button. Suddenly that moment when you're walking down a street corner with a great busker playing a fun song, and you realize the feed is open, and you can share five minutes of kind of grilla audio with the people around the world, or you happen to find yourself in a great conversation, and you can suddenly, and you think it's interesting, you want to share it with some people. And then the hit you get where people you've never even met, or maybe old friends, or on Twitter responding to the stuff you're saying, and suddenly this conversation with three people, it seemed kind of intense and meaningful. You're realizing you're sharing maybe only the three or four other people elsewhere, and that was a really interesting DJ too, because he brought some professionalism to the station. The other thing is really important, and I heard these guys talking about this in New York. When the station started, we really didn't know what it was going to be like. We thought it would mostly be pre-recorded stuff, uploaded, and relatively polished. And we were usually pretty hesitant to do live stuff, because it seemed scarier and riskier, and just technically maybe a little more complicated. Scott Lowe was something of a mentor to all of us, because he had this professional radio kind of backing, and he had all these tricks and tips, and he was very generous with his expertise in his blogging. So over time, the identity of the station changes so much, but just to circle back to what I started with my initial point, where I think people miss the point. First of all, you don't have to be part of DS-106 Radio, or DS-106 Radio. You don't have to like DS-106 Radio to take a look at this model and do it for yourself. The tools are out there, and if you look at what Grant's been blogging, and others have been blogging, he showed up these guys when they were in New York. He said, you know, I've been seeing people talk about DS-106 Radio. It sounded interesting, and I'm all for it in theory, but I didn't want to take part in it, because I think it's a punk station, which was just like, what? All of us kind of shook our heads. We realized that obviously, because maybe we're doing a certain kind of thing with a certain, we find certain things fun, and we're perverse in that way, that maybe it's not welcoming to everybody and everybody's rhythms, but the really important thing to remember is, you don't have to come and write on my blog. You don't have to come and write on Jim's blog. You can start your own. And really, the framework for doing this stuff on your own, again, as Grant pointed out, this is not new technology. Pretty much these frameworks have been around for more than 10 years, but it's not a defined space. It doesn't tell you that this kind of interaction happens here, and this kind of interaction happens here. It happens organically. And why does it have to be radio? Because in this way, you start seeing opportunities elsewhere. So, some of the DS-106 stuff that's happened around live video, I think it's been really interesting as well. Yeah, so I think that's just one point I really want to come out of this, is I hope you're not just looking at this presentation and seeing a bunch of guys congratulating themselves on how much fun they're having on the radio. It's been the most fun I've had on the internet in my life, and it's been really rich and rewarding. The point is, this framework is infinitely extensible and rearrangeable to the values and the rhythms that you feel more comfortable with if this isn't your thing. Very much a replica model. It's very, very inexpensive and very, very easy to do. It doesn't require any real specialized knowledge at all. All the documentation is online, freely available, and we're happy to talk with you. I think that was a good time to start to open things up and take some questions. You did say at one point it really ties into teaching, learning, and sharing, and the sharing is obvious and it's great. It looks awesome, frankly. I do see some application with digital stories and things like that. The teaching and the learning, I was kind of curious, what kind of course was this housed within and how did you assess or how did you tie it into the teaching and learning of the course? Okay, so this was connected with the course that we teach at Mary Washington. There's an interesting story there called Digital Storytelling, a computer science class 100 level and the idea of this class is what happened is when DS106 radio blew up is when we opened up the class and said anyone could take it. And so it was an open class and people started taking, so 450 people signed up. I'd say about 150 stayed with it regularly over the course of the semester and what happened is the class kind of exploded and it provided this platform. But the students who were in the class there were 75 registered students and then another 100 and some outside of that. They were asked to do a radio show and they were asked to do a series of bumpers to kind of get them into the media because we were already doing audio. The other thing is one of the best digital stories I've ever heard came from a woman who was from Brooklyn the West Indies from Brooklyn came down to Fredericksburg where I am and did this amazing story I call her the Edgar Allen Poe of the West Indies where she eats her daughter's husband. Is that right? Yeah, she eats her daughter's husband two bottles of relish was another one I don't know maybe that's not making a point it's not about eating people but it's about not primarily it's about this idea that we integrated this into a curriculum but as Brian says the curriculum was one small part of it the radio actually took on the life of its own and it was much bigger than the class but the students got exposure to it and what really started to interest me is they worked for DS 106 radio and that's its own community but I want to bring this idea back to U of W and have a B U of W radio and so integrate that across all disciplines because it doesn't have to be just a digital storytelling class it could be an economics class, it could be a geography class folklore music class we have faculty who are going to do different assignments in these different disciplines to feed the radio so you have an hour talking about geography and you know the geography is around the world and they're doing that in a different mode they're doing that in the mode of audio and producing for audio and sound effects and thinking about the medium differently and that's where it's cool because it doesn't have to be digital storytelling it's not just one class it could be across every discipline I don't care about sciences, math you can do it all it's a platform for sharing audio so whatever a sign you assign can be assessed the way that you typically assess it this is a platform for students to share on the one hand and also to feel like to enrich the experience that they're communicating with a larger audience so it's very powerful for that like an illuminate or something that they're going to drop files in there and you can see what they've done in a radio station it seems very difficult but there's so much in there how do you find your students and what they did in there it was pretty easy because they've logged the work they did and so I had a track of everything they did and Grant set it up that you could have a dropbox so in the dropbox they called dropitumi all their files I asked them to name their files in a particular way and just through file naming we could find everything so actually it was really far more streamlined than illuminate and what was cool was it was ambient it wasn't like going in and is your JavaScript working make video like no it was radio and as Grant always says it's in the background it's what we live and breathe and for me I think it was a better open experience for people who don't really care about the course I just wanted to hear when Brian came out and talked about mashups or when someone like just wanted to tune in it was really cool I sort of put a hand back there along the same lines if you're used to very structured environments like blackboard or illuminate I guess coming in this can seem very chaotic or very intense could you just speak to that a little bit like do you feel like this is chaotic and intense or how does that make you think about illuminate how many times we got into illuminate I said can you hear me this is on you got the chat you have the slides you have the audio you've got all these tools you simply need to listen you don't have to watch any video there's no talking head all you need to do is be an active listener so it's actually that process of all those different voices coming in yeah it can be a little chaotic because it'll be a little music and then there'll be a report from a student or from a instructor some cases somebody's at a conference and what they're hearing is great and they put that that goes on and the students end up listening in and do some conference stuff or maybe it's just a bunch of instructors instructional designers so yeah that part is chaotic because you get all this audio coming in but for our participant as far as a listener it's really clear you just have to listen and as someone who was a guest lecturer in Jim's course it's an interesting exercise when you get used to presentation where and then suddenly you're asked to share an hour with students and communicate strictly using audio knowing you don't have those tools so tell me you can't tell a good story with just your voice or just using your words I mean if you listen to a show like this American Life if you listen to I mean it's an incredibly rich medium and yeah if you want people to be able to refer to stuff I threw together a wiki page that people could go look at and click the link so they could see the stuff I was talking about on their own speed but actually the discipline of simplifying that technology and just saying no you've got to try to communicate some ideas here yeah my name's Elmer Masterson with the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction we've been running a blogging and podcasting network called Class Cast since 2005 and that lets law faculty call in on the phone they can upload and record MP3s and video and stuff right now it's running on WordPress and we've managed to accumulate in that time 30,000 hours of lectures and course summaries and Q&A sessions and symposium recordings where have you been all my life well we've been around I mean you know we're very small and you know I run that and I run a website that gets used by 10,000 law students a day for other stuff too and so my time gets split up but the law faculty from we've had about well right now I've got about 3,000 law faculty probably about half of whom are using the podcasting capabilities in one way or another and they come from schools all over the country because we're a membership organization and we have about 200 law schools in the US and so we actually cut across all of whatever they're doing locally to give them this space I've had law faculty now have been podcasting their classes by recording them and uploading them or calling in daily updates for going on 4 or 5 years like religiously they've worked it into their thing and their students love it and their students will listen to lectures over and over and over again just to know what to be ready for their exams and stuff how much time do we have? can I say this, I've got a short one paragraph so it responds to the question about whether this is chaotic if you run this for a class it's chaotic you can impose structure on how your students use it and just the way it figures in your curriculum so this is chaotic but that does not need to be the case if you were to do this on your own this is just the way this emerged but you can certainly build in the structure so yeah just to I want to thank everyone here for not bringing up copyright because frankly it is a gray area and it's a little unresolved for people you can't really control what they do for the most part everyone's been really respectful and nice to one another on the radio but I'm sure there's been some copyright law violations and I'm reading this fantastic book right now by a British historian named Adrian Johns it's called Piracy it's really a history of intellectual property through the lens of intellectual property piracy you're talking about the very earliest days of radio in England and the problem that was posed because radio was really developed by all these individual hackers these experimenters but when they started to try to license radio suddenly this concept of the pirate listener emerged and just to finish I just thought this to me I couldn't help the thing in a grant when I was reading this there is no way to tell who was or was not an experimenter no count how many there were another way everyone was an experimenter at least potentially in that case radio took on a different role it might be the trigger that could turn potential into actuality taking dormant talents and enticing them into use the listener may perhaps become an experimenter the experimenter may become an inventor and that's how this a few months has felt to me thanks very much thank you guys for all of the science fair session on this exact thing run my brain and grant come learn more about it