Early last week Ed Beck asked if I would be willing to talk with him (and by extension his class) about some advantages (and limits) of open source applications in education. I think Ed has been following my recent championing of PeerTube, as a result I figured format and function is the best argument so I both streamed and recorded this session using PeerTube vis-à-vis a self-hosted instance of Jitsi Meet—talk about the power of open source. Reclaim Media!
One of the reasons I enjoyed this conversation was it is an articulation of some of the thinking we have been doing at Reclaim Hosting about how certain open source applications like PeerTube (video management and streaming), Azuracast (web radio), and Jitsi Meet (video conferencing), to name just a few, might be understood as a package of open source tools that can be hosted quickly and easily on Reclaim Cloud.
In fact, this was part of the conversation in today’s Reclaim EdTech meeting wherein we were thinking through how something like this could help a student media organization that is trying to support students run their college radio station or even a TV/video streaming service. In fact, Grant Potter’s work as an edtech back in 2010/2011 at UNBC helping students run a web radio station resulted in the mighty ds106radio!
And in this rich edtech tradition, it was cool to hear how Taylor Jadin worked with his campus radio station at St. Norbert College to get them up and running on Azuracast at a fraction of their current hosting costs, not to mention better software. What if Reclaim could reach out and support student media outfits on campus by pointing them to these tools and providing both hosting and support? Reclaim Student Media!
Anyway, it was a fun conversation with Ed, and by proxy his class, that led to more exciting conversations at Reclaim. I appreciate the invite to chat because reflecting on these open source explorations at Reclaim inspires me to keep imagining the possible because I think there is some real value in thinking through a suite of next generation open source tools for the field of education, and it continues to be a very valuable way to spend our time.
Big fan, big fan. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Dittos, mega-dittos. Somewhere between Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, I can remember all these phrases. Ahh,… radio call-in.
Learning and technology have always been existentially intertwingled!