I’ve said it a couple of times before, and I’ll say it again – Twitter makes it suprisingly easy to keep up with what’s going on in philosophy. It’s my favorite thing about Twitter.
One neat thing we’re seeing now is philosophers twittering about what’s going on at a conference they’re attending…live. You don’t get tons of details, but it’s still kind of nice to get an occasional tweet about what’s going on at a conference.
With all these philosophers getting smart phones, I think think the potential to keep up with what’s hot at a conference could be even better.
I’ve been playing around with Qik. It’s a free service that let’s you broadcast live streaming video from your smartphone. The Android app is incredibly simple and straight forward. Open the app. Push the big green button, and you’re streaming live content to your qik page.
After you’re finished you’ve finished streaming, the video is stored in your archive (much like YouTube). With the click of a button you can cross post to YouTube, Facebook, or post a link of your most recent stream to twitter. I tested this one today.
I’m not suggesting philosophers tape entire talks on qik, but the first 3-5 minutes would be great. A good paper should, in that time frame,give me some idea as to whether I want to track down a copy of the paper to read the rest of it.
Of course it would not be cool to do this without the author’s consent. But it seems like it would be very cool, overall, if philosophers put some of that technology they’re carrying around in their pockets to this kind of use (with the consent of the presenters of course).
So, I have a couple of questions:
A. Do you think you’d watch these 3-5 min beginnings of talks if some philosopher recorded them and posted links to the recordings on their twitter feed?
B. What is the most polite/not awkward/not creepy way to secure permission from the author? The reason I ask, is that I thought it might put the author on the spot in awkward way if you approached them just before the start of a talk and asked “Do you mind if I (some stranger you don’t know) video tape a portion of your talk and post it on the internet for the whole world to see?”
(Posted from my Android Phone)
I would definitely use Qik to share conference happenings with undergraduates at my university. I teach in an out-of-the-way place in the southeastern US, and my students would benefit very much from any further connection to academic life and conferences. I always share my conference work with my students, but this would open up many other possibilities. My senior-level Capstone Seminar students would also benefit from seeing professional presentation style in action.
I love Qik, and yes, if the content were interesting, I think folks would watch … while TED Talks is not highly philosophical, they are engaging and I’m thinking of basing my first-year comp course around the videocasts this fall … if philosophical ponderings were equally compelling video, why wouldn’t someone watch? 🙂
(A) Yes, especially for the reason you mention above: to get an overview of the paper and see if I wanted to pursue getting a full copy.
(B) Prior personal relationship would definitely be helpful. My guess is that short of this, you’re going to get a wide range of reactions. I think an email prior to the conference would be good, as you could explain your reasoning more and the recipiant of the request wouldn’t feel so ‘on the spot’.