p2pnet - rss feed: University of Washington file sharing
p2pnet.net news:- Right now, mention p2p file sharing and American universities in the same breath and you’ll almost certainly be talking about the lawsuits launched by Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG against student customers across the country.
However, as is often pointed out online but usually ignored by the mainstream media, there’s far more to peer-to-peer sharing than mere music and movies.
For example, p2p file sharing has arrived at the University of Washington in a big way, and there’s nothing negative about it.
Wanting to make classroom lessons almost immediately available to everyone, it’s using IP-based audio encoding devices throughout 24 classrooms, standardizing on Barix Instreamers.
“The implementation is part of a pilot program through U Washington’s ‘coursecasting’ initiative, headed up by the university’s classroom support services,” says David Nagel on Campus Technology, going on:
“The 24 classrooms, in 13 campus buildings, have been equipped with one Interstreamer each in the projection booth at the back of each classroom. The Instreamer’s line input is connected to the audio output of the PA systems in the classes. Audio is recorded and encoded, at which point the Instreamers connect through the campus network to Classroom Support Services’ central capture server, which processes the audio and uploads it to an archive on one of the university’s portal pages. The portal provides access to the recordings (encoded at lowest quality to keep file sizes small) via RSS.”
The story has David Aldrich, assistant director of classroom support services and director of the coursecasting pilot program, stating:
“We designed our automated coursecasting model around the Instreamer after realizing we could stream directly to a capture server using this device. We liked the fact that the Instreamer had no moving parts and was less likely to fail compared to using computers for audio capture and streaming to a central server. Reliability is a big factor when designing a solution to be scalable. It didn’t hurt that the price point was considerably lower than a computer and the associated installation costs.”
Aldrich says since October 2005, students have been able to access recordings online, and the university has logged about 110,000 lecture downloads through March 2007.
“Previously classroom recordings were accessed by students physically from the university’s library,” says Campus Technology.
Also See:
against student customers - Students ‘worst customers’: RIAA, March 23, 2007
Campus Technology - U Washington Deploys IP-Based ‘Coursecasting’, March 23, 2007
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