Explore the Unknown!
September 29, 2020
Please share this missive with your friends & neighbors.
Hi WN@TL Fans,
Now is the Summer of Our Discontent made glorious autumn by this boon of Zoom.
Tomorrow night, September 30, at 7:00 pm Central we will prototype the Wednesday Nite @ The Lab by Zoom.
Happily, I get to add “guinea pig” to my list of duties with WN@TL: I will give the pilot episode on “Emerging Issues in Biotech & Food.” Kendall Kupfer of the Biotech Center will be helping to welcome you and she’ll also be helping to iron out the technical wrinkles.
Please register at https://uwmadison.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrce2vrDwtHNBMv0FxIcmw56npNOhu831_
This registration should suffice through the end of May 2021.
I have set this up as a Zoom Meeting rather than as a Zoom Webinar. This is good news for a couple of reasons:
1. Our Zoom license does not include Webinars, so we couldn’t do Webinars anyways; and
2. Zoom Meetings will allow everyone to choose whether to turn on their video; and I’ll be able to unmute you in the pre-talk warmup (we’ll probably fire up the video around 6:50pm) and you’ll be able to ask questions by audio or by chat. I believe this is as close to the WN@TL experience in the Biotech Center Auditorium as the technology permits.
I’ll record the presentations and Q&A and post them on the WN@TL YouTube site.
On October 7 Bruce Johnson will continue our pre-season of WN@TL prototypes by Zoom. Bruce will share the latest in his experiences as a Solar Farmer and electric-car owner charged with electricity gathered from his roof. By the way, Bruce also does live webinars for a living, so he’ll be able to provide us an extra layer of technical insights.
On October 14 Kristin Krokowski of the Master Gardener Program of UW-Madison Division of Extension will share with us her horticultural insights. She works to create timely and relevant education and information for the green industry, fruit and vegetable growers and farmers’ market managers throughout Wisconsin.
On October 21 Ankur Desai of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences will speak on “Weird Ways Climate Change Will Affect Us That You Probably Didn’t Know.” I was in California last month for the fires, and the apocalyptic skies qualified as weird for me. Alas, I’m guessing the list runs much, much longer.
I’m grateful to Bruce, Kristin and Ankur for agreeing to help with the prototyping phase of bringing back WN@TL online as a public science series offered every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, albeit by Zoom. And I’d be especially grateful to have you join in and to share your insights for improving the WN@TL-by-Zoom experience.
I also greatly appreciate Tina Hauser and her University Place team at PBS Wisconsin for including WN@TL in the re-opening of recordings for “University Place.” In a couple months we’ll be able to start having University Place presentations featured at WN@TL, at a rate of about two Wednesdays a month.
Thus, we’re going through some Protean transformations. It’s likely that we won’t return to our home field with live WN@TL presentations from the Biotech Center for up to another year. But at least now we all can be back in the game as best we can be.
I’d be happy to respond to any questions or suggestions.
And so at long last, I am delighted to say: I hope to see you tomorrow at 7 by Zoom, now that we can resume Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
Tom Zinnen
Biotechnology Center & Division of Extension, Wisconsin 4-H
UW-Madison