+Kay Hill's Honors English class has been reading (among many other interesting things) both George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and +Cory Doctorow's Little Brother.
Apparently Doctorow has had some connections to Kay's high school — after the shooting there in December '13, he called up to ask if there was anything he could do. One result was that today the English classes studying Little Brother got to have a live Google Hangout with Doctorow.
Except … well, hell, I've been in enough demos and large-group technology meets to know that this kind of stuff never goes as smoothly as it could, and rarely as smoothly as the test the day before. In this case, there were problems with the video feed in both directions, at different times, and after addressing three or four student questions, the connection at the high school end apparently dropped, much to everyone's frustration.
(The teacher sent a link to the Hangout to parents, so some of us got to watch.)
Sorry it didn't turn out quite as planned, on either side, but I was glad they got what they did, and it's pretty cool that this kind of thing can be done.
(I also followed along a chat line that the students were using, which had a lot of interesting discussion about the trade-off between liberty and safety.)
really wish the feed was better.
+Alex Clark-McGlenn
Sorry, Google Hangouts crashed and burned for us after just a few minutes. If we can, we're going to try to reschedule for April, but not sure we can make it work (or that the tech will work then, either)
+Karl Fisch I'll say that I've had Google Hangouts do some great video conferencing for me. I simply attributed it to Demonstration Gremlins.