Episode: 1723
Title: HPR1723: Success With Students
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1723/hpr1723.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:15:38

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This is HPR episode 1,723 entitled Success with Students.
It is hosted by Kevin and is about 27 minutes long.
The summary is, from taking a podcasting course,
students learn the benefit of creative commons and open source.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by Ananasthos.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
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Hi everybody, this is Ken here. Just before we get to Kevin's show,
I'd like to put in a correction sent in by 5150.
In relation to yesterday's show, the website is www.canzuslinicsfest.us.
That's Kansaslinicsfest.us. Thank you very much for your time.
Hello, hello, I'm Kevin and welcome to another episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
Over the next week while, I want to discuss about a success story I had introducing young
minds to creative commons music and open source software.
On top of that, we're also going to have some creative commons tracks as well as going
over our wee bit of feedback from the previous HPR episode that I did.
Now, before I get into doing this, I really think that maybe I should give you some
background, otherwise the story won't really make an awful lot of sense.
I'm a graphics teacher at the high, local high school and one of the things that we're
required to do now and again is offer what we call elective courses.
Now, these elective courses don't actually offer any form of certificate at the end
with the pupils. They are just purely doing these things for enjoyment and I was told,
but I never were to go before the elective started that I was doing an elective
course and I thought, oh no, what am I going to do?
And I thought about it for a few minutes and I thought, well, I've not got any budget left
to do because I hadn't, additionally, I wasn't meant to be doing it so it couldn't be any cost
of money. So I was thinking, oh, what can I do? And I thought, right, podcasting, I know all
about it and I'm not saying I know everything but I know enough to get people started and it's
also something I'm quite enthusiastic about. So I decided at that point, right then,
I'm going to offer a podcasting course. Now, the first thing that really got me surprised
actually about when I gave the talk was I started with right hands up who can tell me what
a podcast was and I think out of a group of 200, two people put their hands up and that
really shocked me. So I had to give this speech about this and out of that speech quite a number
actually decided to take the course and that was how the podcasting, the podcasting class
was born. Now, so like I said, that's a background. I thought it's kind of essential that I do that
before I continue on with this podcast. Now, those here that recognised my voice would probably
know me from podcasts such as CC Jam, Tux Jam and Crivens and one thing I do like to do is
promote creative colours music and this podcast is going to be absolutely no different.
So without further ado, let's have a very quick track here and we're going to go. This is by
Fixle and it is a try.
You look at me and I'm a bit confused. Am I the one who ran my chest? The light you're
falling your fuse. But then you smile and you laugh. I can't read a sign from a breath. I'm a
take that's not fighting to my love. And I try to move on. Little girls just help me out
and I won't get the feeling once again. And one day I'll be done. I will fight it in time
and I'll shout, I'll have courage to rest you. May I be your man.
Now I'm sitting and waiting here for you every day and every night. But I don't know what to do.
Suddenly you're sitting next to me. I look at you saying, girl, you are my destiny.
But then you smile and you laugh. I can't read a sign from a breath. I'm a take that's not fighting to my love.
And I try to move on. Little girls just help me out and I won't get the feeling once again.
And one day I'll be done. I will fight it in time and I'll shout, I'll have courage to rest you. May I be your man.
But then you smile and you laugh. I can't read a sign from a breath. I'm a take that's not fighting to my love.
And I try to move on. Little girl help me out and I won't get the feeling once again.
And one day I'll be done. I will fight it in time and I'll shout, I'll have courage to rest you.
May I be your man. And I try to move on. Little girl just help me out and I won't get the feeling once again.
And one day I'll be done. I will fight it in time and I'll shout, I'll have courage to rest you. May I be your man.
But then you smile and you laugh. I'll have courage to rest you. May I be your man.
But then you smile and you laugh. May I be your man.
Now, Ted, in the first part of the podcast, I had to teach really these children pretty much everything from what a podcast was to some of the basic steps to create in a podcast.
And one of the things that when I mentioned that you could play a music on a podcast, of course immediately they all started thinking,
oh, I'm going to put on, well, whatever, my favorite tracks. So, you know, they're thinking along the lines of probably Justin Bieber on one direction.
And I said to them, yes, you can actually do that. You can do that if you want.
However, you know, there's a problem with it. It's illegal. You don't have permission to play those tracks.
And you can make it up purely if it's for yourself to listen to maybe another day or can't rent your mates.
But as I pointed out very clearly, it could end up with them being in trouble and possibly even in legal trouble.
Because as I was saying, once something's on the internet, it's always going to be there.
And there's going to be an awful lot of people who could potentially have thought, no, it'll never happen to me who ended up in hot water with a law.
So I had to explain that there were things called pod safe music.
And of course, this led on quite naturally to discussing creative comments.
And none of them, absolutely none of them had heard anything about creative comments licensing.
They just assumed everything was under copyright.
So from that, I actually managed to direct their attention to Jumendo, the free music archive,
and also Bandcamp. Unfortunately, we're Bandcamp.
There seems to be a bit of a difficulty in searching Bandcamp for creative comments music.
So I had to take them down the route of searching.
Dr. GobsiteBandcamp.com with the quote of some rights reserved.
So at first of all, got them to that and I would say, right, pick some tracks you like.
So we managed to do that.
So that was quite good because an awful lot of them did not realize this thing called creative comments even existed.
A lot of them had to get out of the habit of they were wanting to look for the big name bands on Jumendo.
And I was just saying to them, look, it's not going to happen.
You won't have heard of many of these bands if any of them at all.
So they had to get them out of that mindset where they actually had to go and listen to stuff
and look for stuff rather than just picking stuff that the radio told them to listen to.
So that was a wee bit of a challenge.
However, quite a few of them actually embraced this whole creative comments thing.
I wanted to, I really had to work on because they went down the route of if it's free,
it must be rubbish or because it was creative comments, it must be just somebody recording this
on a smartphone in the bedroom.
And I was saying, no, no, these are actually professional bands.
Some of them, some of them are just literally recorded on smartphones and they do sound awful,
but for the majority of them, they're professional bands.
So that got me saying, no, it's not just the music that was free.
However, we're also going to make this whole thing from start to finish as cheap as possible.
Now there's no such thing sadly as free hardware unless you get a donation.
So I, yes, I wrote off the hardware costs and I did say you will have to buy a microphone
unless you got one built in.
So we went over things like that, but then we talked about putting these together because
obviously you've got to record something.
Then you've got to edit the sound file unless you happen to have a very good take and it's all
done in one go.
Then you need a piece of software to put them together.
No, you could use in theory three different pieces of software.
However, I was used to audacity and it was well won.
It was open source, so it was free.
And two, it was also cross-platform because the one thing I really wanted to push on this
was that anybody could do it regardless because you have to bear in mind,
I have children from a complete range, wide range of backgrounds.
It's not like in my area there is a push school or the private school or there's the area
that's mainly working class.
This is one major school for the majority of the island.
So you've got all different types of backgrounds.
So one thing I wanted to do was make it accessible to each and every one of them.
So again, that spoke about open source because they were talking about audacity and we're saying
anybody can download it and of course you made a lot of them thought of torrents,
a bit torrentsite and I'm saying no, no.
I say this is genuine open source.
So in other words, the codes there, you're free to use it.
You're free to do whatever you want with it.
And again, had to initially get past the hole.
Oh, if it's free, it's not any good because that seems to be something that's ingrained well into them.
So sadly, we had to go through that and that took almost a whole hour at one point
just to try and convince them that free software can be good.
So once we actually got started on this, a lot of them realized, hey, this is a good piece of
software and there was another teacher in the school who has a Mac suite and he was offering me
the use of the Mac so I could use GarageBand.
But as I was saying, this whole point is I want this to be accessible to everybody.
Yes, GarageBand could easily have done what I wanted it to do.
But how many of the children that I was teaching could actually take those skills home and use
GarageBand, I'd say probably less than 10% of them.
So we started talking about what it meant to be open-source.
It didn't just mean you could get it free because as I pointed out to them, if you really wanted to,
you could probably get it free from illegal means.
But this is a genuinely legal source.
And of course, I was also pointing out the fact of a computer safety as well.
If you download it from at the legal source, you don't know what's coming with it.
Whereas with if you download a SSD or any open-source from the official means,
then you can see what's there and if you don't know what it is, you can always give it to somebody
else to say, check this code to make sure it's running okay.
And a lot of them did start to get it.
However, it's the story that got even better because I know a lot of them started speaking to me
about different types of software, was it just music software?
And I was saying no, it's not music software, not at all.
It's part of it, but it's a whole array and I started talking about you can have your entire
computer from start to finish running an open-source software.
So of course a lot of them were asking and then start asking a wee bit about it.
And to my happiness, to my celebratory, to the point where I got to all the celebration,
three of them actually brought laptops into school and says, right, will you take us through how
to install Linux on this? Because we'd started speaking about it and the three, there was one,
I got deliberately chose three different ones just so they could see the difference side by side.
So one got LXLE, one chose Ubuntu and one chose Mint.
Of course, the main reason I chose I kept to the Ubuntu base was because there was a good
community behind them. And probably as well, if they were any family members who had used Linux,
it was probably quite a high chance they would use Ubuntu.
So all three of them now, actually to my surprise there, from the feedback I got,
all of the kids loved Unity, one of them liked the LXDE desktop and the other one did not,
what the one that actually installed Mint on did not like the Cinnamon desktop at all.
So I was to be honest, that kind of surprised me. They liked more of the new style desktop,
weren't so keen on the traditional desktop. So in fact, the one who I installed Mint on to
asked me to actually take it off and put Ubuntu on, which I happily did for them.
So there you go, so that was my story of success. Now of course, that's not going to be the same
for each and every person. However, it wasn't by drumming it into them that Windows was bad,
that proprietary software was evil. This was just talking to them casually in conversation.
And I think that's one of the key things. When we're doing our day to day stuff, we tend to forget
not everybody is quite technologically minded as ourselves. So when we're actually talking about
creative commons music, we're talking about open-source software. Then I know a lot of just showing
people a practical use for it, just showing that this can be useful, that it isn't just, you know,
two people and two people making up an audio track in the bedroom on a smartphone rather than
in a studio. It's just showing people that, you know, these things don't have to be pure quality or
low quality. And I was really amazed at how well they embraced it. Now out of the three,
which are a bit of sad news, one of them decided he wasn't. He didn't delete the partition,
but he didn't really keep using Linux either. But I think that was just because when I told him,
he was a big gamer, and when I told him that gaming wasn't really in its prime for Linux,
you know, to be honest, if he was wanting to triple-lay titles, it would be better sticking
windows. And I think that scared him off a wee bit. So there still is that to contend with. Although
to be fair, Steam is doing a very good job of getting some better titles on to Linux.
Now then, so that was a wee story. We success story. It made me want to cheer,
and that is reflected actually on my next track. The track is sun, the band is sun-versed,
and the track is make my day, which these three people certainly did.
I'm done now, my father alone, now I'm dying, and now I'm wise, I'm gonna hold on,
but I like anyhow that you leave me, and that's where the one comes in.
I love my song, when your music comes true, when you take it away from you, from your style,
and your true. I've gotta make my own day, I have to make out my mind, I've gotta wake up so
away, it's a way to be sure of yourself, world is free from my dreams I've had to begin.
My life, however I want to, my joy, my joy, my joy, my joy, my joy, my joy, my joy, my joy.
I've gotta make my own day, I have to make out my mind, I've gotta wake up so
I've gotta make my own day, I have to make out my mind, I've gotta wake up so
I've gotta make my own day, I have to make out my mind, I've gotta make out my mind.
Now for the fiction, I just wanted to cover a wee bit of feedback really from the episode 1703,
which actually was my first show for HPR Flying Solo, and I did get quite a bit of actual feedback now from outside
from the GNU social aspect of it. I got feedback saying that generally it was quite positive but
that I missed out both Windigo and John Culp, both said that I missed out ABCDE, which is a CLI Ripper.
So that's something that again, I may have to go back to look at. J'sra pointed out as well that I didn't use G-Rip,
which apparently is just scandalous, it was really terrible.
Ken Farland, who I'm quite honored actually listen to the whole thing to be honest,
the big man, the big head honcho for HPR, he says, sadly K3B was missing from the list, definitely want to review.
I had a comment from Charles as well left on the show and it was nice informed of introduction to these rippers.
I greatly enjoyed the music intermissions too, so that's good to get back now.
If I get more than 3, if I get a few more, this suggested to me, I will do a follow-up episode on review more.
To be honest, I wasn't really wanting to do a definitive guide to CD ripping, it was just kind of comparing the different styles.
So in other words, how did the GUI applications compare with the command line and how did they compare with the full music suites,
but I'll quite happily do a follow-up for that if that's what people want.
Now, if you want to contact me, there's a few ways you can do it. One, you can go to the HPR show notes and actually add a comment to it.
However, I don't usually get notifications for that, so forgive me if I take a wee while to respond.
The other way, and probably more direct way, is to email, I'm kevyatunseenstudio.co.uk
Or if you want to get in touch with me on social network, I'm on Twitter, I'm at kevy49, at kevy49.
And I'm also on the GNU social at micro.fragdev.com, and I'm at kevy there, as well as join daisbara.co.uk, and again, I'm at kevy there.
So if you actually liked or liked anything, just like anything, or just want to generally add a comment, then please do.
If you want to contact me and suggest something, again, it's something that I'll be quite happy to hear back from you.
It just gives feedback if you think, no, no, this wasn't tacky enough, if you think it...
Well, certainly wouldn't be too tacky this episode anyway.
But it's always good to get feedback, but please at least keep it constructive criticism.
Let's not have too many insults.
But anyway, I know that the community for HPR wouldn't stoop themselves to throwing anyway, I know that.
So this isn't Facebook or Twitter.
Right then.
So that's pretty much me, goodbye, and I hope you'll hear me again, either in Tux-jam, Kriven's or CC-jam, the future episode of HPR.
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