2011 Online Venice Exhibit

We talk a lot about livestreaming and broadcasting at DTLT. It has quickly become one of the core focuses of our group through projects like DTLT Today and the purchase of our own Kit. We made the proposal to the Teaching Center at UMW to have a kit that would allow us flexibility to go into a classroom and broadcast that action live, bring in folks from around the world to engage and interact with the students. Yesterday we got the first opportunity to do just that. Professor Marjorie Och has led a group of art history students at UMW through the creation of an exhibit on Venice that is completely online. You can probably guess based on that URL that we helped them build it on top of Wordpress with UMW Blogs and between the work they did and some tweaking we did to the Autofocus+ theme the site is gorgeous. The opening of the exhibit was yesterday and Andy and I brought the whole setup down to the room to stream it live. I made the announcement on Twitter that we'd be broadcasting and even though there wasn't a live chat involved with this particular project, I knew from feedback that folks were watching. https://twitter.com/fjfitz/status/147012488939057153 Because of how great Wirecast is we were able to easily install Desktop Presenter on the instructor station and pull that in as a feed source for the video. The result is a mix of straight camera shots of the student's presenting their work combined with a live view of them showing PowerPoints and displaying their sections of the site. You can catch the full video at their exhibit site at http://venice11.umwblogs.org/opening/. What's also great is that they've chosen to leave comments open on all pages of the site. This isn't a static product that they've created, it's an exhibit that invites discussion and they've kept that channel open. It's a beautiful model for how a collaborative group project can come together and the students of UMW along with Professor Marjorie Och have much to be proud of. Of course I couldn't let this moment go without talking a bit about it on DTLT Today yesterday so you can watch that for some more background.