Karaoke coming to the #OERCamp Global Online Conference

It felt good yesterday to jump on the bava.tv for some homegrown karaoke streaming, and this session was even done with something of a purpose. The folks at #OERCamp asked the great Tim Owens to present on Reclaim Cloud, which he forwarded to me cause he is knee-deep in Reclaim Arcade magic. I responded with interest, but that quickly became a conversation about running a Karaoke session—which is a good indicator of my status as washed-up edtech. But unlike most folks with an ego, I embrace my waning relevance. I would sign-up as a recurring celebrity on the edtech Hollywood Squares without hesitation. Oh how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition.

All kidding aside, I’m loving this new found niche. In fact, I got another email this morning asking if we might run another karaoke session in mid-December, so I’ll have to reach out to my partner in crime, the great Chahira Nouira, to see if she can do both events. That said, I can confirm she is a lock for #OERCamp, which will be happening next Friday night, December 10th at 9 PM CET.

I have to admit there is some regret over not doing the OpenEd21 Karaoke session they reached out about, but Fall was a blur of work this year—so we do what we can. Anyway, for this karaoke test I used the PeerTube live streaming option I have on bava.tv. The live stream video can be embedded elsewhere, so I can have #OERCamp create a page and embed the streaming video so folks who want to watch can head there, keeping Zoom just for folks who are singing. That simplifies the Zoom overhead a bit, and also enables folks to watch, laugh, and hopefully comment on the live steam. Unfortunately, that is where PeerTube falls down a bit, there is no native chat for live streams in that platform.

Installing Owncast on Reclaim Cloud

Another open source streaming application I have been playing with this Fall, Owncast, might actually be a good alternative given it has chat built-in. Also, given I can run it on Reclaim Cloud I could spin a custom app up for each event that could be run on a subdomain of their site, like karaoke.oercamp.de. That would enable some domain/brand cohesiveness and also provide a space for folks to link into the Zoom room if they want to actually sing. It would be a pretty good use of the waiting room feature on Zoom too, enabling us to have one or two folks on deck, but minimize interference in the studio 🙂

Summer Summit 2020 KaraOERke Setup Update

I think next up is testing Owncast and then playing in Zoom to see if I remember how all that works, but it is high-time to put together a slick Karaoke solution for folks if they want to do this at their own events (edtech or otherwise). I blogged my 2020 Summer Summit setup which is a good reminder that Zoom wins the day for karaoke, but wondering if Streamyard is an option as well? At the end of the day Chahira and I are doing it because it’s a lot of fun and we love singing into the void, but it would be nice for folks to do it themselves because it could help cutout the Eagles and Billy Joel middlemen that come with our hosted events 🙂 Anyway, much more on this in the next week or two, until then I’ll be singing myself silly on the internet!