 Let's go ahead and get started. I'm glad you could join us today. Welcome. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the Coalition for Networked Information. And you've joined us for one of the project briefing sessions for the second day of week two of the CNI fall 2020 virtual member meeting to remind you the themes of week three address technology, infrastructure, and standards primarily. And we've got a bit of technology and a bit of infrastructure here, as well as some very interesting organizational and operational questions. A couple of quick logistical things. I would just remind you that along with the synchronous project briefing sessions, we have also released quite a number of prerecorded videos this week. And I'd invite you to browse among those as your time and interests allow. We are recording this session. And we will be making it available subsequently. Normally, we have closed captioning available for some reason. It is being very bulky at this session. And so I don't think it is available for this session live. However, we will make sure that the recording gets closed captioned. And for anyone who was counting on that for the live session, I apologize. There is a chat window. And please feel free to use that during the session. There's also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen. And you can use that to ask questions as they occur to you during the presentations. Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate a Q&A session after we've heard the two presentations. So with that, let me introduce the session. We have with us two speakers, both from North Carolina State University, Claire Cahoon and Colin Nichols. The topic here is a really interesting one that seems to be emerging as a repeated theme through a number of the presentations. And that is how to think about spaces and activities that were really designed to be very hands-on, things like maker spaces. In an environment where we can't do hands-on, where if we can do hands-on, it has to be done at very low densities. And yet, where these are really important places and activities to support teaching and learning and research. And we're going to have a very interesting look at this based on some experience and some experiments being done at NCSU. And with that, I just would like to thank Claire and Colin for joining us and turn it over to Colin to start the presentation. Welcome and thank you. Thank you for the great introduction. So as you already mentioned, my name is Colin Nichols. I'm the experiential learning services librarian at NCSU. And this is Claire Cahoon with the NCSU Libraries Fellows. And we're here to talk to you today about how to make that tricky adaptation into an online virtual world when the work that you do is so tied to the physical affordances of a makerspace and VR studio and digital media lab. Just really quick, I'm sure you're all familiar. There is a global pandemic. And that has required us to close a lot of our spaces that normally do provide direct hands-on access to technologies and skills. Places like our DH Hill Library Makerspace over here on the left-hand side, which is normally a place where we host classes, workshops, open hours. People have direct hands-on access to things like the laser cutter, the 3D printers, our sewing machines, our electronics workbenches, and things like that. It's also a teaching and learning space. We do have whole classes that happen in that space as well. Our VR studio here in the middle, where we have six full-size, full-room scale setups of VR with the high-end full VR heads-up displays. You can see one of our student workers there wearing one of those. And our numerous music and media rooms, we have a number of music in media rooms in both the Hill and Hunt Libraries. All of these spaces are closed off discrete rooms where people put lots of hands on the same pieces of equipment. And that presents immediate challenges right now during our current pandemic. So really the background of this project is what can we do to make these spaces, make the expertise available online? And how do we continue to employ the myriad student workers that we currently pay, who are our space and service experts, people who run the 3D printers, who give people VR orientations and help teach how to make media like music and video? One of the ways we've been using to rethink these spaces and to figure out how to use the services and make them available is by using Twitch, which is a platform and that you might be familiar with. Hopefully there's a Zoom poll coming your way that just asks what you might already know about Twitch. And the options here, maybe you've never heard of it before. You've heard the name in passing. I've heard the name before. I've watched a few streams, a few of these live streams from any channel, not just ours. You might be a regular user, or you might be a Twitch streamer, a real power user with this platform. So if you could just let us know what you might already know about this. And there is no pressure when we started this project. I had only heard the name Twitch before, so I've been doing. We've had a crash course on how this all works together and we'll walk through it in just a minute. So what is Twitch? Well, the most clinical way to describe it, and it sounds like most of you have heard of it before or have never heard of it, it's a virtual space. It does interactive live broadcasting. So what does that mean? It means that we live stream events from those spaces that we mentioned before, the Maker Space, our VR Studio, Digital Media Lab. And there's an interactive component where you can talk with the people who are doing the live stream. So you can, if you click through one more time, Colin, so we can see the screenshot in the back. This is what a Twitch stream would look like. This main box here, you can see it's a document camera that points down at our digital embroidery machine. This stream was how to use the digital embroidery machine. Our student employee Andrew, who was running this one, was creating some kind of a patch. And so he designed it live in front of everyone who was watching and then showed us the digital embroidery machine, all the steps he went through to create it, and we got to watch along with him. So that's one of the main features. You share your screen, similar to Zoom. You can also share cameras. You can capture video games from the VR Studio and a lot more. You have a lot of options. So we also usually have a camera. You can see in the bottom right corner of that. This is Andrew, he's waving. So there's also a camera pointed on the person. It feels very personal. You're talking with someone. And then as a viewer, on the very right of the screen, there is a chat box. And that text is much too small to read. You don't need to read it. But to give you an idea, you see people asking questions or just chatting with the person who's streaming. You might ask a question about what type of software he's using or how did you put that together? How did you come up with your design? And then he can answer them live on the screen. Or we also have a student employee that is the moderator of the chat room, who keeps conversation going, gives you relevant links and things like that. So you might use this platform for things like watching somebody work on an interesting project or use equipment that you don't currently have access to. You can see and interact with people who are doing interesting things and no interesting things, even if you're not right there with them and have access to these things just to figure out what's out there. So the next slide is another example of streams that we run. This is from our VR studio. This is Megan who's using a VR, well, I'm not sure if it's a game or a platform, an application called Tilt Brush where you can create 3D paintings in VR. She's creating, I think, a mini golf course here, which is a really interesting thing to watch, just another aspect of our channel. And I wanted to list a couple of similar platforms. You might have also heard of things like YouTube Live or Facebook Live, Instagram Live, or also live streaming platforms. Those are all, of course, tied more closely to social media and Twitch isn't, which sets it apart. So we're in Zoom right now. So why not use Zoom? Why use Twitch? We had a couple of reasons for this and the first and probably the most important is that we see it as a really approachable platform and it's really widely used, especially in a younger audience, which overlaps a lot with the college student audience. It's a very casual, informal environment. It's not as mediated as most spaces. It's a place where we hope that students can just be themselves. Tying into that a couple of the features, it's not meant to be watched, start to finish. It's a lot more like live TV. You can drop in and see things because you don't have to register and sign up ahead of time like you might have to for a workshop or something similar in Zoom. It's also anonymous, which of course has positives and negatives. We have some safety measures in place that I'd be happy to talk about later, but the benefits of that are that people don't have to feel self-conscious about the questions that they ask or the ways that they're interacting with people if they might be embarrassed because they've never used a 3D printer before or they don't know anything about VR. It's not tied to their school account and it's not attached to their school email so they can just be themselves as themselves and not as a student or as an employee. Also, in the realm of features, it works synchronously for live streams and asynchronously. You can save those live streams as videos to watch later, to have your viewers watch later. And it also works well on any browser, which means it's accessible on mobile devices and on computers. So we just wanted to take a moment to talk about the team that we have to pull this off. As Claire mentioned, we started this six months ago. She started working with the library in July and a month and a half later, we started streaming. And that takes a lot of logistics, a lot of work, a lot of physical infrastructure and things that need to be set up and run. And so while the two main people working on this are Claire and myself, we're the two librarians here. And it's under the auspices of a fellows initiative that Claire is working on. We also have some of the time of two full-time staff who oversee our makerspace and VR studio. We have six students who work almost exclusively on the Twitch project, where they are creating these streams, creating this content, or they are moderating the chat that's happening in there or they're planning new things that are going to come soon. And then we have a whole bunch of other folks who are involved, but a little bit less so. Folks that are like guests and collaborators, people who are putting on special events that we're highlighting, and we have an advisory group. And one of the things that Twitch is really conducive for one of the things that having such a large group allows us is that we can show off a lot of diverse voices in the library by having a large team of students and a large advisory group. We can have a lot of different perspectives shared on the channel. And by working with guests and collaborators across campus, we're hoping to increase the diversity of what we're showing off on our stream. So over here on the right, you can see two more examples of things that we've streamed. One of them is our student, Nick, who is showing off a free open-source CAD program called FreeCAD. And this is actually our associate head of our department and who's showing off how to sew coasters and from her house. What does it take to do all of this? And I'm hoping that you can see from this incredibly distracting screenshot. It can get very complicated very quickly. The way you kind of think about this technology-wise is what do you want to put on the screen and what equipment do you need in order to make that viewable? So the very basic setup is gonna be some sort of microphone, a USB microphone's preferred, some kind of camera, like a document camera or a webcam, a PC or a Mac to capture that and send it up. And then in the middle of all of that is the OBS software. That's what you're seeing in the screenshot here. It's the thing that can grab all these different sources and put them on screen and overlay them together so that they can make some kind of sense. And then you have to decide what is the special content that you're showing? Are you showing off 3D printing? Are you showing off a laser cutter? Are you showing off DJ equipment or VR headsets? All of that is additional equipment that you're gonna do. And the more different kinds of things that you do, the more complicated each individual setup becomes. So you might need to get a capture card to capture the Nintendo Switch, but you might also have to get a special headset or plug into the capture card so that you can both hear the sound that the Switch is making but also record the sound that you're making and getting these things all tied together can be complicated the first couple of times that you set it up. But OBS open broadcast software is an open source solution that will talk to a lot of these different kinds of streaming channels and platforms. There are a few limitations to Twitch that we have found over the semester of streaming. And the first one is just the purpose of the platform. Twitch's purpose is not for education. It's meant for individuals who are creating or streaming their own personal hobbies, usually with the aim of making money eventually, getting enough followers and viewers that they can make money out of it. That's not at all what we're trying to do. We can't accept any money for the kinds of content that we put forward. That's not our goal. And we're also purely educational. There's no separate educational account type or separate rules. There is more and more educational content, people doing professors office hours or topic chats, things like that. But it hasn't been separated enough that there are rules that we can follow separate from individuals' rules. That also means that terms of service are kind of tricky for us. The regular terms of service, not so much, but the affiliate program, which is a tiered system for Twitch once you have enough viewers and you have streamed enough, they offer you a few more benefits called the affiliate program. Things like you can upload pre-made videos instead of only doing live content. You can customize more of your options and you can do reruns of old content instead of doing these streams. All of which would be great for us, but it also comes with donations and allowing viewers to give you money and subscribe to your channel in a way that we can't agree to as members of the North Carolina state program. The last part is a problem that's not just unique to Twitch, but for everyone right now, doing things remote and versus in-person, this is just a tricky balance. Remote streams work pretty well, but that also requires more equipment and setup for individual computers that have to stream to our channel. We do have a few streaming stations in the libraries, one in the makerspace and one in our VR studio and then one new one in the digital media lab. However, not everyone is able or feels comfortable coming into the library and we wanna make sure that they can still participate. So we've been balancing getting people equipment and figuring out internet connections and other barriers that might come up. So there are some challenges to being remote, however, going back full in-person, there are also challenges for that because our streaming stations are repurposed from other spaces. So as those spaces open up sometime in the future, we'll have to rethink that as well. So besides those things, how are we using Twitch right now? What is on our channel? The number one thing that we've been working on are these drop-in-hour sessions meant for people who used to come into the space or ask questions that way and figure out what's there who can't come into the space right now. This was, these are Twitch streams meant for people to come and ask questions. We show something and also share what we know. We haven't gotten as many of those questions as we had thought we might. So we've shifted our focus a little bit. Now it's less about gathering questions like a reference desk and more like a demonstration space. So we can share the expertise of the student employees who are sharing things. We can share the spaces themselves and also types of equipment and activities that you could do in the spaces. We've also had some special guests from across the libraries, things like research librarians who have done knitting streams. We've done creative coding with the data and visualizations librarian. We had the student success team play Animal Crossing and Mario Kart, things like that. So across a full range of different things from people across the libraries like Colin mentioned. And some of those have led to some deeper collaborations like the student success team who we worked with to do streams for exam wellness week, more of a de-stress, find other outlets during exams times. You can see one of those on the top screenshot here. This is one of our students Norm who's playing a DJ set and explaining how he creates music in this way. So you both get to listen to his music. Here's an explanation. It was a really interesting stream for that exam week. And it's also led to some more broad collaborations. The second one we mentioned here is the brickyard broadcast, which is a collaboration with the music department and one of the people that we work with in the libraries, Colin Keenan, who created a VR brickyard which is our campus commons. And when you enter this VR space, it was to experience the world premiere of a new piece of music. It was played by several ensembles from around the campus and the community a really interesting event and a good chance for us to use the Twitch channel to broadcast an artist talk combined with the event. And you can see a screenshot of that on the bottom here. So what are the numbers? These are some of our stats from this semester, our streaming ran from August 31st to November 20th. During that time we did 75 streams and we had 17 different people streaming those. I think none of these numbers really capture how much we learned about the platform and about our viewers and all the different things we've done. But we have also, I think, grown a lot. We have an average of about three viewers per stream. Though that number varies pretty widely just depending on the time of year. The highest number at any given time for the average stream was about 25, low ones we only get one or two but an average of three for something where people drop it and drop out, they watch a little bit at a time. We were really happy with that. And at this point we have 106 followers. That graph on the right of the screen is the number of new followers by week through the whole semester. You can kind of see there was an increase right at the beginning when it was new and people were just figuring out what we were doing. And then a dip in the middle of the semester and we increased again at the end, especially this last few right around finals week. But I do wanna point out there are some outliers in all of our data, the Brickyard broadcast because it casts such a wide net and had so many different types of viewers coming in. The numbers far surpass what we usually did. I think we had 500 people watching that at its peak. And also the video afterwards had something like 1800 views. So that's an outlier from most of our streams and it definitely shows we gained a lot of followers from that too. But overall we're steadily growing and really pleased with this so far. And I just wanted to clarify that where it says an average of three viewers per stream. That means at any given moment across any of our streams you'll find an average of three viewers currently looking. So we might have as many as 30 concurrent viewers but they might only stay for 10 minutes and then continue 10 minutes without 30 viewers. So that's kind of how that number gets generated. It's a little tricky the way that they present the information in their analytics page. One of the things that we learned while doing this for this first semester is that it's very different from putting on workshops or teaching courses. It feels very different in terms of the amount of time that you invest upfront versus the amount of time that people are participating or watching the content. And that you can really get pretty decent production value with very little preparation time and get pretty good results based on that. So that for example, this top stream here this is one of our staff who is running this machine. It's called the Axie Draw. It's a plotter that holds a pen and guides it around kind of like a 3D printer might do. And it's just really mesmerizing to watch. So just setting up a webcam to point down at this thing while Justin's hanging out there playing some music in the background running the new thing, switching the pens. It's just, it took maybe 20 minutes of preparation to get this machine up and running. And then the actual content or what happens afterward is you hit play on the music and you chat with people. So you can make a lot of content really quickly that way. And a corollary is that experiential learning spaces like the makerspace, the digital media labs and VR studios are very well poised to make this kinds of interesting content. We already have a lot of equipment. We already have a lot of software. We already have a lot of interesting things that go on in those spaces every day. Conversely, we also found that the more time you invest the larger the impact you can have particularly in those larger collaborations, things like the Brickyard broadcast where we partnered with the Department of Music. We partnered with a known composer. It was mentioned in the News and Observer and the Washington Post and a couple of other media outlets including the campus newspaper, The Tech Mission and that brought a much larger audience to that individual stream. So what's next for the stream? What are we working on for the spring? We're working on a slightly more consistent schedule. The way that Twitch presents your scheduling information you get to lay it out a week at a time. You can't say, oh, this Friday I'm doing something from one to two unless you told it last Friday that you're going to do it this next Friday from one to two. So it makes it really hard to do things in a less consistent way. So we're trying to get all of our guest streams planned out in advance so we can get them into the schedule earlier. We're going to be doing more advertising and outreach with more campus partners trying to find more places that we can get it mentioned getting in the student newspaper, getting it on eboards, having it in more newsletters and more ways to reach more people on campus. And we're also planning more new content categories more collaborations with folks on campus building out more of our media streams and just try to do more in the way of planning of what we're going to put on there so that on Monday our student might be building the designs that on Wednesday we're going to 3D print and then on Thursday we're going to paint and then on Friday we're going to show them in like a VR environment or something like that. So with that, that is the end of our presentation. We'd be happy to answer any questions you have now or at any other time. You've got our contact information here and I see that we do have something in the Q&A box. Yes, we do. Thank you so much, Claire and Colin. Fascinating methods you're using. So interesting to hear about. And you're right, Michael Seidel does have a question for you and he asks, he says, you explain that Twitch is more informal but it's not clear to me that Twitch offers features beyond those of Zoom. Is there a reason for a university using Zoom to switch to Twitch? I think that's a really good question and that's something that we've thought a lot about. What about Twitch makes it good for this particular use? I would say that Twitch is not replacing Zoom in any way. It Zoom is great for these individual meetings. It's great for conferences and it works really well for those sorts of things. We found that Twitch is in addition to that a more flexible platform. You can do more with it. And I think, I mean, I say that it's less formal but there are fewer barriers to enter. If you wanted to create a Zoom meeting, you wanted to have a workshop on Zoom, you would need to download the software, have access to the software, make sure that you are registered, sign up and then remember what time it is and then show up and make sure that you can log in and appear and at that point, you can participate. Twitch, if you have the link to our channel and you know when something is happening, then that's the only thing you need to do to watch a Twitch stream. And we really like that openness. It means that not just people from North Carolina State University can participate. Anyone across the world can watch our Twitch streams and I know we've had viewers that come from across the country, a few international viewers that are just interested in what's happening and so I don't think that you necessarily need to switch from Zoom to Twitch, but I think that Twitch is an additional facet to this that you could add on if you wanted to do demonstrations or make something widely publicly available. I would just add that Twitch is really, really good for the one to many kind of broadcast sort of situation where you have one person or a team putting together content that you're sharing with a large group of people anonymous or semi-anonymous or not anonymous. And that's something that Zoom does fairly well in the webinar format, but that's a little bit more difficult to get your hands on whereas Twitch, it's free. You sign up for an account, you get started streaming like they have their own client, you can download and stream the next 10 minutes I guarantee it, it makes it pretty easy to cross that barrier. And then the persistency of that location is really helpful. The fact that if you go right now to twitch.tv slash ncsulibraries, you will find our channel and you will find all of our old streams and you'll be able to review them and see the chat that happened on those streams and you'll be able to see the kinds of questions that people ask and the kinds of content that we cover and you'll have a live chat box right there waiting to chat with anyone who happens to be on there at the same time. So that persistency kind of allows it to be a place to grow that community. I know a lot of universities are struggling with how do we forge those bonds to campus when people aren't on campus, when your life is in Zoom, how do you form a connection to NC State? So we're trying to find another way that we can provide a place for community to grow and allow people to mingle with each other. Thanks very much for drawing those distinctions. I see that we're a little bit past the hour so, and Michael thanks you as well. So I'm going to go ahead and thank Claire and Colin again for this wonderful presentation and thank you to all of our attendees. And as we're a little bit beyond the hour, I'll go ahead and turn off the recording here but any attendees who are still with us, I think we'll probably continue the conversation a little bit here. So please stay join us, raise your hand I can turn on your microphone and you can ask questions or just join the conversation with that. Thank you everyone, have a great rest of your day and I hope we'll see you back here at CNI. Take care, bye-bye.