The theme of the upcoming ETUG Fall Workshop “Little (Workshop) of Horrors” is

Tales of Fails and Edtech Experiments .

I have seen a few examples of videos from participants telling their tales of woe, and also wanted to share one.  Of course it should be entertaining, and informative.  So thinking about my history in edtech there are a few fails.  I can tell the story of Owl Gate, or He Who Shall Not Be Named, or something from before my time at TRU. I will share all three here starting back in the 90’s when I was attending film school at SFU and then decide which I will share at the conference.  A friend of mine, Silver Butler (yes her really name) was working as a production assistant in Vancouver and mentioned they needed some PA help on the weekend.  Eager to get as much exposure as I could in the industry I told her I would be there.  She gave me the address and Friday afternoon I showed up at 112 Hastings street to a run down 5 story building housing an artist coop.  Buzzed the door and said I was there for the filming.  Some guy opened the door and let me in.  Top couple floors were barren with just a bar set up and a few couches.  The second floor housed a bunch of spaces for sculptures and painters, as well as living quarters for Jason who had let me in.  We chatted for a sec and then got down to moving things around up stairs, talking a bit about shooting angles.  Then we pulled in some kegs of beer and did a few other cleanup jobs to get the set ready.

I worked until about midnight, left, and came back mid afternoon for the shoot was scheduled for that evening.  Jason told me they were hosting a big party and were going to film the party and the art show at the same time.  Great.  Asked if Silver was going to be there, and he said he wasn’t sure.  A couple camera guys showed up I helped who ever and with what ever I could.  Went home after 2am and never thought much more about it.  Ran into Silver a few days later and she asked why I hadn’t showed up.  I told her I had showed up, and the address where I was.  Ahh, 112 East Hastings, not 112 WEST Hastings.  So all in all not much a failure but more of a sitcom.

The next example I have is Owl Gate.

In the early days of OL, Bob Byrne and I were looking into what it would take to do live streaming.  We tried out the tech, and secured an account with a CDN.  A few weeks later a physics professor showed up and asked if we could live stream some nesting owls outside the window of the science building. We went over, set up a camera and laptop to stream the nesting owls to a couple of his colleagues. That was Thursday, and I believe Friday was a holiday.

Well mid morning on Monday, the CIO bursts into our office and says the owl-cam is down and I need to get it up before the senate meeting.  So Bob looks at the account and we have used up our alloted bandwidth. That’s weird.  So we look at the traffic I think we hit 30,000 views before the CDN shut us down.  What the hell? 30,000 views?  Well it turns out someone forward the link to a cute critter cam site and it basically went viral.  So much for a couple of colleagues.

 

I’ll get to He Who Shall Not Be Named another time. This one involves the Premier and denial of service attacks.