Thanks to our friends at WhippleHill for this video of the excellent Keynote address by Ben Jones, VP for Communications at Oberlin College and former Director of Communications for the MIT Office of Admissions. Ben shared his experiences in using social media, focusing on the “what,” “why,” and “how” from his point of view. This is a truly engaging presentation and should be a “must watch” for anyone thinking about how to use social media to advance the goals of educational institutions.

About Ben:

Ben Jones is a national expert on blogging, social networking, and creative uses of web 2.0 initiatives in higher education. His pioneering work in admissions blogging was recently featured in a front-page article in the New York Times. In July 2008, Jones was appointed Vice President for Communications at Oberlin College, where he double majored in English and Environmental Studies as an undergraduate. In his first year, Jones overhauled Oberlin’s web presence and launched a variety of social media initiatives. Highlights included student and faculty blogs and the Oberlin Stories Project, which translates Oberlin to the world via hundreds of primary-source narratives from students and alumni. Under his leadership, Oberlin’s Office of Communications established an official presence across all major third-party social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn. The Global Language Monitor recently ranked liberal arts colleges “according to their appearance on the Internet, throughout the blogosphere, and in global print and electronic media;” Oberlin was ranked 5th.

Prior to his appointment at Oberlin, Jones served for four years as Director of Communications in the MIT Office of Admissions. At MIT, he developed a communications plan and admissions web community (mitadmissions.org) that has been cited nationally as the gold standard in admissions communications. During his tenure, MIT’s applications increased 28 percent. Previously, Jones was a founder and partner at Blue Coda Inc., a web strategy firm whose clients include Harvard, MIT, and Boston University. He served as a director of design and production for About.com, the fifth largest web site in the world at the time; directed the online version of American Prospect Magazine; and helped to develop an online community known as the Electronic Policy Network. Jones is an active musician with multiple songwriting awards to his credit. He and his wife, Tanya Rosen-Jones, have two sons, Emerson and Asa.

So you are interested in getting started at your school with live streaming video. Maybe you want to make a concert or athletic event available to parents and alumni who are far from your campus. Perhaps your video club or film class wants to do television but you don’t want to go through a costly rewiring of your school to support a cable TV type broadcast system.

Of course you could always record the event and then make it available on your Web site, but an event streamed live over the internet is more exciting and engages your constituents in a different way. And anyway, who wants to edit, upload and host a multi hour video? This process is time consuming and resource intensive – and who would actually watch a recorded video of that length?

So streaming video live is where you want to go, but where do you begin? What kind of camera and other hardware do you need, which of the many live streaming services do you use? How will your audience tune in?

Getting Started
Your first broadcast should be a low risk affair. If it doesn’t work, nobody will care – but if you pull it off you will be a hero. Start small and simple and build from there. Pretty soon your Head of School will want to do a ‘State of the Union’ type address live over the internet!

For a basic broadcast you’ll need a camera, a computer, an internet connection and an account on a live streaming service like Livestream or Ustream. At it’s most basic you plug your camera into your computer, connect to a streaming service via your internet connection, cue your camera and go live. Each of the streaming services gives you a channel page where your audience will tune in, or you can pull the embed code and put your broadcast on your own Web site.

For a basic broadcast your hardware needs are limited, in fact your computer might already have a webcam and mic built right in!

Hardware
After a few test broadcasts with a basic set up you will realize that you need a better camera or mic. A tripod is a must for a good quality shot, but you don’t need to choose a really expensive camera since you probably aren’t going to be broadcasting at HD quality. A simple camera and a USB mic will improve your broadcast considerably. Eventually, depending on the kind of show you are planning you might want a camera that can support HD and some kind of lapel type mic (also known as a ‘lavalier’ or just ‘lav’ mic).

If you can bring your audio and video signal together through your camera this will simplify things once you get to your streaming service, but most services support mixing different audio and video signals into your stream.

Streaming Service
The choice of service you use to bring your signal to the world should be based on what kinds of features you are looking for and what limitations you are willing to settle on. The chart below compares two of the most popular services.

Both Livestream and UStream quickly bring your signal to the web, record it for ‘on-demand’ play back and integrate chat and Twitter, but they differ on some of the additional features they offer. UStream’s add free premium version called Watershed is a very good value but all UStream can do is to bring your signal to the web. If you would like to add multiple cameras or professional looking screen graphics then Livestream is for you. Later in this article I’ll talk about how to get some of these same effects out of UStream, so you could get the cheaper add free platform and retain the fancy effects.

From my point of view the two killer features of Livestream that really set it apart is the ability to mix a live feed with pre-recorded videos directly from your browser. If you wanted to have a lead-in video before your show, for example, Livestream makes it very simple. Mixing multiple cameras from your browser is also a remarkable feature. Each camera could be in a different room, or a different country, as long as they are connected to the internet you can mix live between all of them. Imagine having your sports reporter in the gymnasium, your cultural reporter in China and your anchors hosting the show from a third location! Livestream can handle all this directly from your browser.

Camtwist & BoinxTV
“But, I want to have fancy graphics and pre-roll videos,” you might be saying, “but I also want the great ad-free value of something like Watershed.” Yes, you can have your cake and eat it too, but the trade off is going to be complexity and/or cost. Livestream is great because you can do all the fancy tricks directly from your browser, while UStream doesn’t let you do this. So what we need to do is add lower third graphics, crawlers and videos to your signal before you send it up to UStream.

There are a couple of ways to do this. Camtwist for the mac (or I think ManyCam for the PC) is a free app that basically pretends to be a camera driver. Your live streaming platform will see it as a ‘camera’ but you are able to add all sorts of things to the video signal before it goes upstream. Camtwist allows you to mix videos on your computer with any cameras connected to your machine and overlay graphics, pictures, crawlers and all sorts of effects. The Camtwist ‘studio’ is a little cumbersome to use and also has some issues handling multiple audio sources (workarounds include using something like Audio Hijack Pro or Soundflower), but for the price it’s a remarkable piece of software. One additional thing you can do with Camtwist is stream a part of your desktop, so if you wanted to bring in a Skype conversation or show a PowerPoint presentation you could do that.

If you want a slick interface with multiple layers of video, audio, movies and chroma key check out BoinxTV for the mac. Although pricey and hardware intensive this is a fantastic desktop app for editing live video. Their solution for getting a live audio and video signal out to your streaming service is a little clunky but functional. If you have the money and hardware you can produce a very high quality program using this application.

Flash Encoding
If you’ve been streaming for any length of time you might start to notice some browser crashes. Flash encoding of live video signals is a big deal and it’s hard work for your browser. You can take some of the load off your browser, avoid crashes, and achieve a more robust broadcast by encoding the flash video signal locally on your own machine before sending the signal upstream. Check out Flash Media Encoder for the PC or Quicktime Broadcaster for the mac. These applications also let you dial in the signal quality you are broadcasting which is handy in case you need to dumb down your stream due to bandwidth restrictions on your local network.

Teleprompter
So you are fully up and streaming to Livestream using a lav mic and studio lights, ready to cut to your reporter court-side for the post game interview, but your anchors can’t remember what they are supposed to say! For a few dollars in plywood and plastic you can build yourself a fully functional teleprompter.

There are a few decent free apps that will let you edit your script and prepare it for playback on your teleprompter, but for a highly customizable and solid product check out Presentation Prompter.

You are Live in 5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1
If you can live with the ads and are looking for a simple and straightforward solution that can handle multiple cameras, both live and recorded video, and provide very nice looking screen graphics then Livestream is a very robust solution.  For a simple platform with a low cost ad-free option check out UStream.

Perhaps you will simply open your laptop and point your webcam, or maybe you will use multiple cameras, local flash encoding and a desktop live streaming application. Whatever the technology, streaming platform or level of technical complexity, sharing events on your campus with alumni, parents and friends of the school through live broadcasting is a great idea.

Before long folks will be asking, “when is the next live broadcast?”

A conversation with Montclair Kimberley Academy’s Bill Stites about the school’s Irish Studies senior elective and trip.

Bill talked about the transition from documenting the trip via a static web site to a Wordpress powered blog that folded in Flickr, Twitter, & Youtube to share their experiences as they traveled throughout Ireland.

Going social allowed family, friends & the MKA community to remain connected & contribute to the experience while also providing the students with an opportunity to form new, unexpected connections with people from all over the world- an experience not at all uncommon to social media. One such example being Eion Ryan, a Member of the European Parliament.

Bill went on to chat about how faculty at MKA followed his lead- from blogs to record & share trips to China & Guatemala to influencing other areas such as the Middle School newspaper.

The Irish Studies Program was proof to the school that for impact and reach, “showing” is more effective than “telling.”

Follow Irish Studies on Twitter!

This weekend, I was browsing the White House web site because my kids asked me to see pictures of Obama’s daughters.  It’s not surprising that the President  moved his use of social media right over to WhiteHouse.gov, but I have to say that I was surprised to see this much real estate dedicated to their social networking/media profile:

My take away?  When you’re discussing social media and schools with your administration, use President Obama as an example.

Who or what else do you use as an example of social media being a topic your school must not ignore?

After attending the edSocialMedia bootcamp in February and hearing what is possible to do with blogs, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube — and seeing what people are doing at places like Worcester Academy, we have changed our publishing format to include these new tools.

We will be using a WordPress blog, running on our own Apple Xserve, to publish our stories of the trip and chronicle the Irish Famine and Irish history. Using Twitter, we will be posting more daily updates to the site in an effort to keep people even more informed of our progress. We will take advantage of YouTube and Flickr and it’s integration into the Apple iLife ‘09 suite to publish our videos and images. In the past we have been limited in our updates by the availability of Internet access (normally internet cafes), but this year we will be using an iPhone and the apps from Twitter and WordPress to post content wherever and whenever want to along our journey through Ireland. We are also working on securing a broadband USB based modem through an Irish telecommunication carrier (Vodafone).

With each of these tools we will be able to reach a larger audience, which until this point has been primarily an MKA audience. Our goal is to take all that we do while traveling –  the stories, the videos and the pictures — and open it all up to the world, to invite people to comment and participate in our journey, and share in and contribute to our learning.

In future blog posts, I will be discussing the preparation and pre-trip training with students, the impact on communication and sharing with a larger audience (we already have 43 followers on Twitter) and how this all works out.

You can find out more about our program, including out program and trip blogs and social media channels at the following locations:

• Irish Studies Program: http://irishstudies.mka.org
• 2009 Irish Studies Site: http://irish2009.mka.org – This year’s site
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/irishstudies – Follow us.
• YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/mkairishstudies
• Flickr Photostream: http://www.flickr.com/irishstudies

You can follow William Stites on Twitter @wstites

Additional highlights from our conversation:

• A breakdown of the current social media projects underway at Lausanne Collegiate School.
• What drew her (and Lausanne) to social media from a marketing perspective.
• How researching an NAIS article helped her establish social media best practices for the school.
• How Lausanne’s social media plan dovetails with the school’s web site.

If you’re interested in learning more about Lorrie’s perspectives on social media, checkout her blog, Message Matters, and her posts on edSocialMedia.

Many thanks to Lorrie for taking the time to come on the show.

In that moment I certainly could have gone in a variety of directions with that comment; either looking to dismiss the question or prove a point. Rather, I gently offered the analogy that personal learning networks are simply the best of what the six degrees of separation has to offer. And while I probably did not do it justice at the time as I’ve reflected on that day I’ve come to realize that that is exactly the proper  way to address the doubting  Thomas who has yet to come to grips with why people blog, tweet, or update walls.

Why? If you stop to consider what it means to be part of a

personal or professional learning network, or as I prefer one’s “learning ecosystem”, you quickly realize that these ecosystems thrive because of four very distinct members. You have your contributors – who offer content, your connectors – who link people together, your lurkers – who take the knowledge and use it to better themselves without giving back and your casual passers-by – who fall between the contributors and lurkers. Without these four distinct and critical members any type of learning ecosystem would cease to exist and social media and P.L.N.’s are certainly no different.

Consider this; Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book The Tipping Point “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social skills.” The same holds true for learning ecosystems; where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole and without each individual member one’s own learning ecosystem would wither and die.

Therefore, the next time someone asks “who cares” when asking about social media and learning ecosystems make sure you tell them that while they might not, their best friend’s brother’s wife’s colleague’s sister just might find what you are talking about important to them. And if that’s the case make sure to remind them to pass it on…they just might make a difference.

-Jason Ramsden

Follow Jason on twitter @raventech or on his blog Raventech Reveals

Patrick Bassett, President, NAIS

Patrick Bassett, President of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) joined me for a joint episode of The edSocialMedia Podcast and AdmissionsQuest’s Boarding School Podcast. Our conversation covered two main areas:

1. School strategies and sustainability in the current economic climate.
2. The ways in which schools can use new media to bind constituencies and reach and serve families.

Topics Pat covered with their approximate time into the conversation:

• School Financial Sustainability and Adjustments: what’s happening now for families and faculty (1:30)
• School Budgeting, Planning and Spending (4:06)
• Financial Aid Need and Availability (5:10)
• Schools Strengthen Constituent Relationships (8:00)
• One School’s Solicitation Video: Oakwood School’s “Don’t Give” (9:00)
• Combining Traditional and New Media to Reach Everyone: Keeping the Old School While Adopting the New (10:50)
• Media Strategies for Schools: Making New Media Practices and Approaches Happen (13:30)

Some three years and 95 episodes later, Alex, Arvind & Vinny have built a premiere weekly webcast- broadcast every Thursday at 1 pm EST- that “explores the intersection of education and technology.”

Many thanks to the three for providing an inside look into the program.

Listen to: An Inside Look at EdTechTalk’s 21st Century Learning Series (opens a new window)

Open edSocialMedia BrainyFlix podcast in a new window