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Interesting idea...
Link: Wikibooks takes on textbook industry.
if Jimmy Wales and his colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation have anything to say about it, you could have another way to go--the Wikibooks project. It's their attempt to create a comprehensive, kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free and freely distributable, based on an open-source development model.
Cool! A current copyright law title that's fully available online with a creative commons license - that's putting your money where your mouth is! Sorry for the majority of you, this is Canadian copyright law, but here's the summary:
Link: In the Public Interest: The Future of Canadian Copyright Law.
From Grokster to Google, copyright has emerged as one of the Internet's most challenging legal issues. Once limited to a select group of scholars, copyright now captures front page headlines as millions of Canadians consider its impact on education, technology, communication, and culture.
As Canada embarks on a new round of digital copyright reform, this collection of 19 essays from Canada's leading copyright experts provides context and analysis of the latest reform proposals. Edited by Professor Michael Geist, an internationally-regarded authority on Internet and technology law, the collection reviews international copyright norms, assesses dozens of specific Bill C-60 provisions, and identifies potential future copyright reform initiatives. Completed immediately after the introduction of Bill C-60, this timely volume provides policy makers, lawyers, judges, educators, and interested Canadians with the tools and knowledge they need to participate in a copyright debate that will shape the future of the Internet, culture, and education in Canada.
I think I might start another blog in which I just complain about the weather we have here so close to the Rockies. My wife thinks I complain too much, but hey, if that's the only thing to complain about where I live that's not so bad, is it? I know this isn't much of a snowfall, but consider, this is but one month removed from August!!!
(click for full sized image of the horror)
Hey, check this out! Greg Szczyrbak, one of the first people I knew who jumped on the Captivate bandwagon, pointed me to CaptivatePlayer: Delivering Captivate Content on the Web.
Basically it's a menu wrapper for Captivate Flash files- a simple way to organize and make them available to the end user. Looks pretty straightforward in the implementation, requiring only some text-editing to name the files that should appear in the dropdown menu. I haven't tried it yet, but in reading the instructions I'll betcha this could be used to 1) play any flash-based screencast files, and 2) as long as they were the same dimensions, and maybe even if they weren't, mix screencasts from different products! So if you experiment with two or three products, this would be a really neat and transparent way to offer them all in the same uniform way!
Looks like it'll be a week or two before I get a chance to play with it, but check out what Greg's done at http://library.millersville.edu/tutorials/cp/ (he notes it's still a work in progress). Gives me a chance to note Greg's use of a nice intro music clip to the first tutorial as well - I could see the right piece of music triggering a Pavlovian response in the student: "Hey, that's the library tutorial music - it's learnin' time!"
The TeleCampus Course Development Team at the University of Texas recently completed a side-by-side comparison of the major screencasting tools. Look across the top of the page for the links to demos of Captivate, ViewletBuilder/ViewletCam, and Camtasia. Last "tab" is a comparison, which I found a little confusing. There are numbers running down the left side that don't have a key. At first I thought they were the number of products that could do X in the grid, but that didn't seem to match up. The MS Word version is a little easier to read. While I only skimmed the grid, I noticed some of the information to be suspect (for instance, they indicate ViewletBuilder isn't available for the Mac - oh wait, the Mac version appears to have been pulled from the Qarbon site!). Ok, the only other thing I noticed then was that their prices seemed a little high - I don't think the prices on their grid represent educational discounts for Camtasia or ViewletBuilder. They also don't tell us specifically which versions of the software they were using (Camtasia recently released a new version, for instance). I found it ironic that the Macromedia product seemed to do the worst job of capturing a flash file!
Thanks to Karen in Winnipeg for the link.
Sarah reports there's a new version of JYBE on the horizon: LibrarianInBlack: JYBE in all its rosy goodness. Lots of added features, and for the first time, a pricetag. Well, we don't know what the pricetag will be exactly, but for the library version there will be one. Good idea to add customized toolbar options for the library to the previously-sparse JYBE toolbar.
Here's what my little weather bug showed me when I first sat down at the computer this AM: 
It's comin' folks!
Not really library related, but what an interesting tool for distance students (or any students). Writely - The Web Word Processor, is just that, plus some. Create an account, and you can upload or create a document online. It's got a WYSIWYG editor, and multiple people can collaborate on the same document, which can be either public or private. Distance students always seem to have these collaborative group projects they're working on - great tool for that type of thing. But what else is neat is that now students don't actually have to buy a copy of MS Office, because the documents created with Writely can be saved as an MS Word file (just remember to include the .doc in the filename in the lower right corner). It's like a small bridge across the digital divide - I know there are some students who can't afford MS Office, so this is a nice solution.
Right now you can upload Word docs, HTML, text or images. PDF is not supported, but they say just "not yet". Could this be used as a document delivery option somehow? Probably wouldn't be a very streamlined workflow, but hey, if I could password-protect an uploaded PDF...
The US Dept of Education recently released their Projections of Education Statistics to 2014 (PDF). Why do these reports always seem to cop out and not address distance education?!?
From section 2 - Enrollment in Degree-Granting Institutions:
Factors that were not considered
The enrollment projections do not take into account such factors as the cost of a college education, the economic value of an education, and the impact of distance learning due to technological changes. These factors may produce changes in enrollment levels.
ooh, that reminds me though, a new semester has started and I have to but the Registrar's Office to get enrollment stats for OUR distance students.
I don't see this feature in our version of WilsonWeb, so it obviously needs to be "switched on", which makes sense since it would need to be married to your local ILL system. We're eventually going to offer one-click ILL through our SFX menu, but if you don't have SFX or similar, and if you allow your distance patrons to use your ILL forms, this might be a nice option.
Read all about it on their press release.
Last week Rita Barsun posted a question about the effectiveness of online tutorials to several lists. Yesterday she posted a lengthy summary of the responses, and I found them to be quite enlightening. Of particular value to me were the citations to the literature that address this question. The posting is available in the OFFCAMP archives.
As announced in InfoBits:
COPYRIGHT is a new open-access, peer-reviewed journal that will publish papers on "all aspects of copyright in the Internet age." Topics covered will include: digital rights management, scholarly communication and open access, collaborative authorship, blogs and other new media, and the social implications of copyright. For more information and for paper-submission guidelines, link to http://www.copyrightjournal.org/index.php/Copyright.
The Sept 2005 issue of Computers in Libraries has a solid article on screencasting, though it's called "demonstration authoring software" in the article. Written by two non-librarian IT folk, it starts with a nice introduction to the concept of screencasting, provides some solid tips for those who are new to the game, and includes a really nice chart comparing the features of the Big 3 - Camtasia Studio, Macromedia Captivate, and Qarbon Viewletbuilder Pro. The only drawback to the chart is that it shows the capabilities of Camtasia Studio 2.1, and 3.0 was recently released with enhancements that make the chart somewhat obsolete already. Ahh technology. The chart is what made the article for me - nice to have the side-by-side comparison like that.
The authors drop the following URL as a place where you can see what they've done, but there's only one presentation there right now: http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/systems/samples.htm
I did some poking around on their site and found several more here, if you just want to see more.
If you've got a subscription to Academic Search Premier and are on campus you should be able to click right in to the article.
How We Used DEMONSTRATION AUTHORING SOFTWARE to Create Tutorials.
Computers in Libraries; Sep2005, Vol. 25 Issue 8, p6-64, 6p
You'll eventually be able to find the article in Expanded Academic ASAP and ABI Inform Trade & Industry, but this most recent issue hasn't been loaded in either of those products just yet...
