Well, have had a pretty extreme few weeks, to say the least. Many many things from some forthcoming developments at edublogs.org to the phantasmagorical world of Ben Barren and some really cool developments at The Knowledge Tree.
Add to that some seriously funky WordPress work (on both sides of that big old pond up there), conducting some pretty sweeping research across the uses of blogs in Higher Education here at the Uni and some even more exciting stuff that I’m not even going to hint at… and yes, I’m starting to come across as a pretty crummy blogger ;)
However! [dramatic flourish] None of this will keep me from the very cool HigherEd BlogCon which has just kicked off and who have been the *very essence* of understanding in allowing me a bit of breathing space for my webcast ‘Blogs as personal learning environments’ which will air on Friday alongside, rather coolly, Ewan’s contribution… we should see how many time the word ‘edublogs’ or ‘edu.blogs’ can possibly get mentioned in two sessions ;)
So head over there, and please bear with me if I take a little longer to respond to email / IM than usual.
[...] James pointed out today that Higher Ed Blog Con is well under way. All the papers and talks are being posted online throughout April and there are some fantastic things coming up. The first day had a great talk from Mark E. Ott called “Giving the students what they want: Short, to-the-point e-lectures” which compares screencasts and podcasts and looks at the utlity of both (the paper also led me to Mark’s really interested educational technology blog “My Educational Diatribe” which I shall be reading from now on.) Also of great interest given my podcasting inclinations was a talk by Colette Vogele and Elizabeth Townsend Gard entitled “Legal issues in podcasting the traditional classroom“. Their abstract: Colette Vogele and Elizabeth Townsend Gard will explore the legal aspects of podcasting in teaching and higher education. Colette is the author of the new Podcasting Legal Guide (soon to be available at Creative Commons and the Center for Internet and Society) and Elizabeth focuses her research on copyright in an academic environment. Colette will explain legal basics surrounding podcasting, and Elizabeth will focus on the higher education environment, particularly podcasting the traditional classroom. The presentation will address copyright, trademark, and right of publicity/privacy questions that arise in the context of podcasting in the teaching scenario. Copyright questions have to do primarily with third-party materials that are used in the podcast, and the rights under which the podcasting teacher wishes to distribute her content. Traditional licensing, Creative Commons licensing, and public domain dedications would be addressed. Questions about ownership of the podcast content (e.g., the institution vs. the teacher?) would also be discussed. Elizabeth will focus the second part on “What questions should we ask when we podcast the traditional classroom?” This will look at at the specifics of Section 110 of the Copyright Act , which includes both exceptions to using copyrighted materials in the traditional face-to-face classroom teaching and the additional recent exceptions added with the TEACH Act. How does podcasting change classroom choices? What choices do podcasters have when podcasting the classroom? This part will also look at the additional issues of ownership of the podcasted lecture and student work that is podcasted. [...]