Thursday 19 July 2012

Graduation part 2 lol

A couple of days ago I blogged about some things we were doing to make our students and their parents and friends experience of graduation a bit more interactive. I'm pleased to say that the gigapixel photos are up and a huge success. Very high definition, you can zoom in to individual faces, tag them in Facebook, and take a screenshot of you or your friends and post it to your Facebook wall. Thanks to Ed Miller of Re-Axive for doing them for us, as well as graduating himself.

The live video stream is also working well - we get many students each year who we either can't give enough tickets to for all of their family to attend, or their family and friends can't attend for some reason - too far to travel or illness for example. The live stream this year is high quality ( but will be better next year, we're already working on it!), and designed to cope with a high number of users. There's a steady stream of a few hundred people looking at it, and our stats show they're from all over the world. So far, so good. Yesterday afternoon we noticed that the viewing numbers had shot up to over a thousand, and about two minutes of detective work traced this to the brother of one of one of our graduands tweeting to his many followers:

"Guys my sisters university is live streaming the graduation! When I get the link I want you guys to flood it like crazy!!!! IT'LL BE EPIC"
And:
"Everyone! Bombard this link"

Clever eh? What was particularly clever was that it took us about another two minutes to work out who he was and pinpoint the exact seat he was sitting in. :-) So, we were able to have a quiet word with him after the ceremony. Just to point out that if he had brought the stream down, which he had been exhorting his followers to do, he would have stopped parents, brothers, sisters, friends, from all over the world seeing their loved ones graduate. Of course, he behaved in the arrogant, cocky way we expected, and we even got a lol tweet afterwards:-). But, no harm done, our stream coped easily with about 1,700 viewers, and it's a lesson to all of us that part of our planning and risk analysis always has to include the idiot factor!






- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Our Megan just graduated fantastic event great day liked the student union video before the start of ceremony with facebook quotes and twieets. Congratulations to all graduating at Sheffield this week including Hannah Sharma this afternoon fourth medic in the family!! Graham

Anonymous said...

For those of us who could not watch at the exact hour of the livestream (in my case at noon today), will the events be podcasted/archived here for viewing? If not, that would be a shame, as we were called away due to an illness in the family.

Anonymous said...

Should have thrown the little idiot and his family off campus.