podcasting explosion

Bah. I hate playing catchup, and I do it too frequently. My team has yet to embrace podcasting properly. Possibly because currently only I know much about it, and that isn't a great deal either. However, Pauls will begin to play catchup from next month. (No, that's no grammatical error on my part, I've decided that instead of trying to find/avoid unflattering icelander identifiers, I'm simply going to stick to the plural). For some reason I don't have Paul (E)'s work blog in my RSS reader - I used to go there instead - error now corrected, I have just had the wonders of Facebook (!) and Paul importing 83 notes [blog entries] (great for this but with FB's new feed, I can't scroll far enough to read anything else on his page!) to draw my attention to this new post about lecturers selling podcasts over the internet. Since I don't iTune, I'm not sure what the going rate for stuff is, 79/99p per track, something like that rings a bell, and this guy is charging 2$50 - is that on a par? Anyway, lots of issues (and I'm not Paul or Ed G or someone and it's Saturday and I have electricity (woo) and I can't be bothered tackling the bigger/techier/legal things) spring to mind: they've pulled the idea because after agreeing at first that the lecturer owns the words he speaks in a class, he can do what he likes with them, they've then decided the university needs to make a policy... is it the IP that's the difference, or the fact that he's making the money? Do you have to pay iTunes rates for lectures podcast via iTunes University? If so, does the University get the money? Is that what they're bothered about? If we want people to get into podcasting, telling them the uni owns your words is not the way to go about it. Our academic contracts generally say our employer owns anything we produce in terms of learning materials while we are employed in their contract. So a learning pack belongs to the uni. If you move on, and teach pretty much the same course, in this day and age when you have the word document you'd take it with you and you'd adapt it in your new post if relevant. Even if you didn't, you could still recreate it, as it would be in your head, it would just take time to write down again. They can't download your head when you leave. (well, they can, or in some cases, they ought to *whistles innocently*) but they can't delete it after downloading. What if you write a text book? Well for the most part universities don't mind in the least you doing that, and they don't expect to collect your royalties. So what is the difference between writing a text book with your words and getting royalties for it, and selling mp3s with your words and getting 2$50 a pop? Is it because they think you'll get more 2$50s than you get royalties on the book? (you may not, but it's more visible and so they might think you may) Is it because it's actually your lecture, which they own more as part of your teaching more so than a text book which is more generic (or it wouldn't sell and then it would just be a glorified learning pack)? In which case, what if you didn't exactly podcast/record your lecture, but some additional/slightly changed/vaguely extra resource type material (ie what Ian you started out with before doing lectures) - then would it be more of a text book than a lecture, could you get away with that? What about if you wrote a text book and then read it out in order to produce an audio version to conform to disability regulations. Wouldn't/couldn't that be the same as an mp3 file in the first place?? At the moment I have one member of staff desperate to get into podcasting, but who in the first instance at least will be effectively providing an info stream in addition to normal materials, rather than recording/podcasting lectures. I'd be interested to know, Dr Gaffel, what you think?

However, on the topic more generally of podcasting, I have just downloaded (electricity permitting, I've been trying all week, since Ste fixed my iPodder - please note Bill we don't all iTune - to download a pile of things for me to catch up on, and for Pauls to listen to to work out what our choice of style and content shall be. These include Andy at Bristol (golden oldie now in Bb podcasting, but the fireside chat style still great); Matt & Sam s Bb briefing at Soton (cool newsround effect) but also the Faculty Support site of Bill Viberg (haven't heard them yet they took aaages to download, but have a feeling I'm going to be gutted about more playing catchup to do when I've heard them) and now the latest addition of podcasts - 'Podagogy' - coming from the LTG at UEA. I've got this courtesy of a request from Andy Mee to take part in a podcasting symposium there in a couple of weeks. Go listen. Pauls, we got work to do.... Feed the world...

And the reason I am writing and not podcasting this entry? ...