Learning Conversations

Leon Cych's post on outdoor video streaming got me thinking.

I wondered if I could do the same thing with my phone (a Nokia 5800 - their first attempt to compete with the iPhone, now incredibly cheap).

All About Symbian has a list of 25 top free apps - one of which is Qik, a live video capture utility.

It's a three stage process to get started:

1. Download the app to the phone
2. Create an account on qik.com
3. Login to your account on the phone (make sure you're using wifi or on an uncapped data rate)

Hit the Stream button and you're instantly streaming video to the qik website.

I did try using the rear-facing camera to record myself, but the quality isn't up to much.
So you have to use the main camera, which makes it a bit hard to see what you're streaming (as you'll see below!)

Once the video is finished, it's also available for playback from the Qik site. It can be embedded on any webpage, and sent to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube et al.

Where can I see this being used in a learning & development context?

It's fabulous for streaming and recording stuff that is OK to be public. Conferences, public meetings, conversations etc. The sort of things that you'd put onto Youtube. Not so good if you want to restrict access. For that you'll need uStream's Watershed service.

At the moment, I've no specific application. But it's nice to know it's there when I need it.