I've had some interest from some of you around the area of audio content in educational settings, so I felt compelled to right some words in a few blog posts. I may draw this "series" out over a few weeks or so depending on interest.

Educasting is a system, or method, of digital content distribution such as audio and/or video/pdfs etc.

The most common audio format used is the mp3, I’m sure you’ve heard of that, and this blog post is mainly focused on that format. The term educast implies that the content produced for distribution is able to be automatically downloaded and updated onto mobile devices such as mp3 players, PCs and other similar consumer electronic devices such as mobile phones. In many cases the updating of content occurs simply by plugging the playing device in to a computer.

Without a doubt the main vehicle used for transporting an educast is the internet, though as you are probably interested in your own teaching space the protocol is equally suited to be distributed over intranets and other internal networks found in educational settings which are not necessarily open to public access.

How does it work?

In order to understand the whole process of educasting from creator to listener/viewer I'll break down the system into 6 basic steps or stages:

1. content created – the content can be recorded in a variety of ways and in a variety of locations, of which I’ll blog about in a future post.

2. content uploaded – this is a reasonably simple stage where you upload the digital file, typically an mp3, to a webserver often using the file transfer protocol (FTP). Recently we can see more and more online recorders available where you simply press record on the site itself. (no uploading needed).

3. rss feed created – a really simple syndication (rss) feed is created which has a snippet of code that indicates the uploaded content is in fact an educast.

4. rss aggregators scan subscribed feeds for new content – various software hosted on a users PC enables us to subscribe to rss feeds, the software then scans those feeds for new content.

5. new content found and downloaded to users computer – once the rss aggregator understands a new episode is present the software will download this content to the users machine.

6. content transferred to mobile playback device – often the rss aggregator will automatically load the fresh content onto the mobile player, or this is manually achieved by the user. Of course playing back right on the computer is MASSIVELY common also.

Sounds fairly simple and straightforward right? Well it is!

Certainly all of the both stages can be met within educational environments both in terms of human resources and physical resources. However, perhaps one of the issues which can be daunting when considering utilising educasts in education is the extra effort or time required to continually provide content in this exciting format and in fact make it accessible. That said, the educational benefits an educast can yield are numerous, and you as an educator must have the full support of those who manage educational policy and activities in your institution. This is a BIG deal and one I am passionate about.

Turn on tune in, and they won’t drop out

Everybody working within academia understands that students are becoming more and more technologically savvy, growing up with a mouse almost permanently attached to their right hand, game console in the other, mobile telephone scanning for Wi-Fi hot spots and sending more SMS messages per min than humanly possible.

Aside from my slight rhetoric students are now often very adept and comfortable with interactive technology and able to find what they want when they want, very much used to using technology for organising their social world and certainly their entertainment options.

Students also want, and expect in many cases, their learning environment choices to be just as dynamic and state-of-the-art, and are certainly motivated when presented with dynamic learning tools that have relatedness to their personal worlds, their social life.

Educasting is a tool which fits into this state-of-the-art category and is something which educators can embrace within their learning community to bring about serious “coolness” and “street cred”, not to mention a powerful educational delivery platform both in the hands of the educator and also the learner’s. So we have to be "cool" now as academics? Umm, well yes I think we do to an extent.

Educasting has many unique qualities

Two “biggies” I want to focus on here are:

1. time-shifted delivery (tune-in when you want)
2. use of the voice, which can convey strong emotional content.

If you follow this thought through you as an academic have the ability for your voice, your emotion, your passion to reach the students in their own surroundings at a time they choose, this is a very powerful combination indeed!

As an example, I relish getting into my car each morning with my Zune player loaded with the latest episodes of my favourite casts. The fact I might get caught in morning traffic can actually be a bonus, giving me more listening time before having to engage with the socially demanding world, it’s “my-time”.

This time slot, and of course others, is time for you as a potential content producer, an educaster, where you can directly compete with mainstream broadcasting prime time, in advertising circles this time is highly costly which companies pay handsome fees for.

I hope that helps you think about the possibilities a little? Do let me know where we should head with this, maybe you need some tools, maybe you are already educasting, maybe it’s just too much time needed?

In any case do let me know, I really do want to hear your thoughts.

UPDATE: After writing this text I thought it might be a good idea to actually use an online service to record my voice reading the words, so you can see just how easy it all comes together. So I used Utterz and then grabbed an embed code for my blog which included the player below.

Technorati Tags: acadmic content distribution edu educasting educational ftp internet learning mobile mp3 networks producer protocal recording rss teaching voice webserver zune edu educasting acadmic learning teaching content mp3 recording voice rss zune producer webserver ftp distribution intern

This passed week has been an absolute milestone for the music business in a bad way, well actually it’s a milestone for music and musicians in a positive way, once fully embraced. I would also argue that progressive record companies, with appropriate visionaries at the top could do very well also.

A report written by Michael Arrington published on TechCrunch called The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free basically paints a very gloomy picture for the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and indeed many music Industry bodies.

In the same week we saw RadioHead offering their newly created album for free, well actually that’s not technically correct, they have offered the album to be purchased on YOUR grounds, YOU are able to decide what you wish to donate/pay for an mp3 copy of the album. Incidentally I grabbed a copy myself and paid 5 quid.

Probably the first time in a long time I have personally bought a digital clone of music, and aside from buying it to make a point, it is actually a cracking album, which I’m listening to as I write this.

Digital Clone?

Yes digital clone is exactly what you are buying, possibly stealing, obtaining from a peer to peer (p2p) network, sent from friends, gleaned at a LAN party. However, you are not technically stealing anything nor copying, you are actually cloning information, which is the point in this argument, the clone reproduction costs nothing, hence the drop in the value of music distribution.

Distribution version

The other thing to mention here, and something which some people miss, is that they are giving away the mp3 version of the album. Now I don’t know about you, but I think mp3 sound sucks major ass. Ok so I have audio engineer ears and I work with mp3s every day and continually publish mp3s, but let’s remember the full story here.

The average mp3 has a significant reduction in quality when you compare that to what comes out of the recording studio and onto a 16bit CD. And beyond comparison when discussing DVD audio and other higher sampling and bit rate formats. Yes, mp3 are handy for distributing around the net, and putting on your izunepodriver but they ain’t the “Full Monty”.

Why am I mentioning this?

Well of course Tom York of RadioHead knows full well that he can release his limited edition box-set in a month or two just before xmas, which will contain the “Full Monty”, along with tidy artwork and other bits and piece of merchandise at a whopping 20 quid! – very nice work if you can get it.

Many people still hold dearly the notion of owning something tangible, and of high quality, and people will continue to pay for that. Some people love the tangibility of a signed CD, a limited t-shirt. I have no doubts RadioHead will shift buckets loads of the special box-set, especially during the xmas lead-in, smart marketing indeed.

Of course the other thing that nobody is mentioning is that RadioHead gain LOTS of money for their mp3s which to be honest anyone will be able to get within hours on a p2p network anyway!

RIAA Bastards

Now in the same week, I have been really upset and shocked at the paranoid behaviour of the RIAA who have come down incredibly hard on the single mother caught file-sharing with her mates. Now I know full well that YOU (if I consider a cross section of my readers here and do a rough hands-in-the-air count for an average) have done the same. In fact in this very week I carried out three separate polls each with about 30 students in a room, and guess what? .. around 98% have downloaded music in what possibly could be construed as illegally.

It’s not surprising then that certain formats of music distribution are destined to become free. And it is with this knowledge that the RIAA are fully aware of and carried out a shocking public shaming campaign on one poor woman.

Truth is, the “war is over” as Todd Wachtel mentions. There is no battle anymore, the industry so called “experts” are frankly “pissing into the wind” and getting seriously wet, and the longer they fight against the tide the more mistrust they invoke in us mere mortals, they are not building bridges here in order to embrace the new mechanisms and emerging model.

Days after the RadioHead news Oasis and Nine Inch Nails have also stated their intention to give away their newest work thus fueling the fire to the inevitable. Personally I can see these acts doing well out of enticing more listeners to buy tickets to large concerts, thus in essence not loosing money but gaining a wider audience.

The music as an mp3 is the new banner ad, the new vehicle for viral marketing…..

Embrace and gain

I’ve heard many voices with tones of fear, mainly from musicians about lost revenue, mostly from so called “struggling” artists, but, really? I mean really?

As an artist surely the point is about getting as many people as possible to listen to your music, surely that is exactly what it is about isn’t it? It is about building a fan base and buzz, so isn’t giving your music away for free and encouraging copying/cloning and distribution, actually a good thing?

What are you concerned with then, making money?

As an artist there are countless way to re-coup money, so many I’ll save them for a future blog post, but all that is required is a slightly different mind-set on how you build your audience and what you offer in terms of merchandise.

As my friend Rich Palmer says “Why chain yourself to the old model when there are successful new systems coming into place?”.

Nobody is actually saying they do not value music, they do, I do, I’m a musician! But the voices are saying, share it with us and we’ll tell all our friends and probably come and see you live and probably buy a t-shirt maybe even a box-set with some shwag in to hang on the wall..

And of course I’ve not even mentioned mainstream play-out and royalties, which do not seem to be going away, I can’t see that happening in the short term either. Of course this is exactly why the PRS want a piece of the pie regarding netcasts and internet radio, they see it coming.

Are you pissing into the wind, what do you feel about all this?

A big thanks to the Music Technology Facebook soliders who inspired some of my words here, thanks.

UPDATE: This link just came in: Madonna ditches traditional record label

UPDATE: Month Old, thanks to Ben for sending: What's the future of the music industry

Technorati Tags: business directors labels law marketing model mp3 music record industry recording records revenue riaa sales viral riaa music radiohead oasis bands free mp3 distribution industry

Net casting (in recent years known as podcasting), started for me, way back in the 90s.

I first had a web domain back in the 90s which was an audio service catering for musicians, classical and jazz mostly, I used to record a variety of performances and make them available on the internet for download, and some of these were to “show-off” new violin builds for example, by way of comparative recordings, kind of like A/B recordings. Of course back then this was a fairly time-consuming process due to restrictive speed connections.

Around 2000 I started Audiocourses.com as a post-graduate research project, as distance learning school for music production, sound engineering, and immediately made recorded voice content avaliable for download and streaming. Most of this audio was me giving tutorials in the RealAudio format, on topics such as music production, mixing etc. Being RealAudio format meant listeners could stream fairly easily from the site, RealAudio would select the bandwidth setting automatically for the user. Incidentally these early streams are still available on the Audiocourses.com downloads section and are dated to autumn 2002!

Throughout the early 90’s I uploaded more and more audio content, including such things as drum samples, sound effects and complete 24 track recording studio sessions. I then started audio blogging, which saw me using the telephone as an audio-blogging tool, I also rolled this service out for students, which enabled them to blog their thoughts simply by using a telephone, this was very popular, was quite a buzz chatting into a cell phone back in 2003 and having the content appear on a site as an audio file.

It is since the addition of the enclosure tag in RSS feeds that the concept of “podcasting” (a misguided name, in my opinion) somewhat “popularised” the concept of internet audio and video, but in essence the only thing that had changed (albeit an excellent change) was that content could be downloaded automatically. The fact is that audio/video content had been cast over the net for many years before this.

Having been “waist-deep” in audio content over the web for a number of years I had always toyed with the idea of a “radio show” for sometime (I did a number of radio style streams back in 98/99), but it wasn’t until 2006 that I decided that perhaps a regular show might be damn good therapy for myself and provide added value to the Audiocourses.com site visitors. I’ve always been very keen to ensure clients and students have plenty of virtual community building tools, a distance learning school is all about a sense of something virtually powered, so AC Radio (formally AC Podcast) was born.

Since then I have also introduced some other audio casting services including a text to speech service on SLEDucating, and a soon to be active cast on Audana (both called podcasts, but yes I have issues with that). I also have pro-audio news converted to aggregated audio on AC.

Whilst Podcasting seems to be a current popular term I have now decided to come full circle and reject it, basically just using net cast, or radio, or stream, as to be frank 50% of my current listener’s just stream right off the websites, as they have for years. The other issue is that the word Podcasting is very confusing for non-tech people, (no pod needed). I'm not alone in thinking the term podcasting will be dropped in the future, I of course may be wrong, but Radio, or cast, is far more widespread and understandable which is my excuse for sticking with it, plus I may also actually broadcast some of my shows live, which gives some more validity to using the term radio, even though technically I'll probably not use radio waves, in the electromagnetic sense.

Recently I have been capturing sound in my car and calling these Car Casts, as well as a new fun brain dump called the Running Man Radio show, where I take a portable recorder out on my road roads.

Technorati Tags: audio broadcast casting casts ipod music podcasts radio recording streaming