Thanks to a colleague on campus here for passing these two resources along. The first is Poducateme, a resource for using podcasts in the classroom, with American legal considerations, but there is also a Legal Guide for Canada via the Canadian Creative Commons people.
At the meeting yesterday, a rather interesting point came up about calling what is being done by many in classes as a “podcast”. Because technically, there isn’t much in the way of “casting” going on as the files are more often than not just posted into a CMS and students download them from there, there is no “casting” or automation for the students. Well that is true, in the strictest sense, we are not really casting in these classrooms, we are really “Podposting”, but it’s a baby step, especially until we get the instructors comfortable with the resource and have systems set up with RSS. So should instructors out there who are just posting recordings cheating in any manner? I don’t think so.
The production process is the same, the value to the user is the same (well if not it’s well over 80%), the only part that is lacking is the delivery mechanism. This may be the result of many factors, but it should not distract from the fact that this tool is being used. In the ideal world, there would be some means of easily posting, hosting and casting these files for instructors, but that element is somewhat geekier than many instructors are wanting to get into. So in my opinion, it’s great that they are trying and what they are doing is “close enough for Jazz”…
Leave a Reply