ON A DAY WHEN colleagues from Digital Rights Ireland told me I would no longer enjoy a "private" status for web-accessible educational podcasts, I got an invitation to discuss strategies in a Learning Center wiki. I told Damien Mulley that I think I can avoid the wrath of IMRO by availing of a license spotted by John Handelaar. We need a license because ASCAP fees normally follow from podcasts distributed over the internet. Some of our educasts contain tracks harvested from students' MP3 players in real-time educasts made in college classrooms.
Educasts are 28-minute audio recordings harvested during classroom sessions in Media Writing, Public Relations and Mass Communications courses at Tipperary Institute. Several pre-recorded elements slide into real-time classroom event. Normally, two songs are used to begin and end the segment and they normally come from students' MP3 players. We patch those tracks into a line at the mixing desk that we use in the classroom. We record classroom talking points for revision in no more than seven-minute snippets. Sometimes we wrap 30-second interstitials around these talking points and those pre-produced segments are cached onto iPods for mixing in real-time. Shownotes from a wiki point to content held on our intranet. If all goes well, we produce content during the course of a two-hour class period.
As our experience has shown, most of the students' music tracks are not podsafe so we have to keep them in private space. We hope we can find a license that permits those tracks to be used in public space.
Inspiration from the Craphound ("Fair Use!") and the Podfather ("next-generation radio content in my ears").
