Sunday, November 23, 2008

YouTube Live!

This morning, at 9AM (UTC+8), I configured my Mac to stream audio from Safari to the speakers outside of my room, via AirFoil. I then tuned in to YouTube Live's launch concert in San Francisco.

YouTube - Live's Channel
Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!


With an estimated concurrent viewers of 700,000, this new feature from YouTube made it an even stronger contender in toppling the media conglomerate with user-generated content! Imagine, news coming in from people who are recording and/or streaming from the actual event site even before the news crew arrives or even get different views from different people instead of a single view that is often filtered (censored) by the editors -- news in its raw form!

However, I see this in a different view - as an educator. If YouTube Live evolves into a video-conferencing platform, which is not far from what the infrastructure can do, with multiple participants as well as a way to have it stream publicly or otherwise - then universities will definitely take on this as a way of delivering lectures to far more students than what it can currently reach.

I just cannot stop imagining what this new platform can do for education. I wish that someone from Google is looking at it from the point of view of education as well. :D

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