Reading Treasures – Getting Ready for the Show

Webcasting is about letting it flow, letting it take you to unexpected places, voices and encounters. However, the backstage is about planning, preparation. It seems paradoxical, but, in fact, it isn’t. To let the voices around you feel at ease, the group of webcasters must have an idea on where they want to head. The final end might be unpredictable, but they need to know what they are doing there to makes everyone comfortable and confident to speak their minds.
So, lots of behind-of-the scenes emails have been exchanged between me, Illya, Dennis Oliver, Dennis Newson and Erika. We’ve been planning for our little show with care, trying to troubleshoot before the trouble, testing tools we want to present, sharing our own treasures, setting tasks and roles for everyone to have a smooth Big Wave Ride in SimpleCast and Audacity. Of course, we can not predict what will happen, who will be there, but we can, at least, plan to make the best out of this experience. Just like in any classroom lessonplan. It’s all there, what’s going to happen will really depend on the participants, mood, setting, content, but the educator is the conductor, the one facilitating the process of knowledge construction within the group. Not much different from Webcasting and the group of hosts here.
Our Reading Treasures backstage:

We had an initial plan

Documented it

Exchanged tons of emails

tested audio settings

practiced streaming in different rates, Sandbox A and B, and kicking the stream

talked about possible problems and what to do

set roles for the group (Illya streaming in B and taking care of the recording, as well as interacting with us in the conference call; Carla streaming in A and starting the conference call. Will host with Dennis N; Dennis N. hosting with Carla in Skype; Dennis O. and Erika chat area)

sent invitation to the LearningwithComputers group

created an audio invitation to be released one day before the show (using one of our reading treasure and JingProject)
What you’ll listen here is a talk between Illya and me about our planning for the Reading Treasures Show and what we were doing, practicing and checking.
Webcasting is about making planned unpredictable live journeys!
Carla Arena