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A brief blurb in the Chronicle of Higher Education Blog about how the Library Copyright Alliance is fighting against the latest incarnation of the broadcast flag, arguing that is "could counteract the Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act, which allows educators and libraries to transmit material from news and entertainment programs to students over the Internet."
Technorati Tags: broadcastflag, DistanceEd
Finally read an EBSCO newsletter that's been sitting in my inbox all week, and discovered that in February EBSCO will introduce a "Visual Search" feature to all (?) of their databases. When you watch this 30-second flash video of how it will work, you'll see that it's Grokker that's been licensed. Time to update those screencasts!
Technorati Tags: grokker, search, ebsco, visualsearch
Sometime late last summer, Techsmith sent me a licensed copy of SnagIt 7 and Camtasia Studio to evaluate, in hopes that I would like them and tell the world. At the time, I was a staunch user of Qarbon ViewletBuilder Pro for my screencasting, and of Pixelmetrics CaptureWiz Lite for my average static screen capture needs. I had purchased copies of both of those products and was perfectly happy with them. It took me several months to even install the software Techsmith sent me.
Last night I needed to update a screencast, and the tool I chose, without a second thought, was Camtasia Studio. I have been using SnagIt for about three months and absolutely love it - it does so much more than the tool I had been using. In fairness, Pixelmetrics has a Pro version of CaptureWiz too, so I wasn't exactly comparing apples to apples, but I can't think of a thing I need that SnagIt doesn't do. Well, that's finally true as of last week when I got to install the final version of SnagIt version 8, which is officially released today.
To explain that final feature I have to tell you about one of the neatest things SnagIt does; after grabbing a screenshot it immediately drops the shot into an editor where you can annotate, highlight, crop, etc. Used to be that once you'd made an annotation of any sort, that annotation was locked in there. You could delete it, but you couldn't move it. Not a huge deal, but definately a minor annoyance. Version 8 fixes that, so as long as you haven't saved the final edited picture, you can simply grab the annotation or box you've drawn and nudge it over if you need to. That was the last complaint I had about the product and it's fixed now.
Amit at Digital Inspiration waxes poetic about some of the other enhancements to the product, and of course Techsmith has the official list of enhancements.
One final loverly feature is that combined with Thunderbird, I'm able to drop these annotated screen captures in an email to a distance student with one keystroke. I believe this is more a feature of Thunderbird, in that I wasn't able to do this back when I was using the Mozilla suite email product; then I had to save the capture and then insert it, rather than simply paste it right in. I have no idea if Outlook supports this, though I suspect it must. An absolutely wonderful way to explain where to look on the screen instead of typing it all out.
You can download a 30-day evaluation copy of SnagIt - give it a try. I don't get any kickback from them; it's just a tool that's at the top of my toolkit and I think you might like it too. Oh, I do find that because it offers so many features, it looks a little intimidating at first, but don't let that scare you. Get to know the basics (I only use about 10 percent of the features, if that!) and move on from there. Educational pricing page is here.
Technorati Tags: screencapture, techsmith, SnagIt
Hadn't seen an announcement on this one, but Meredith just pointed out to me that the Call for Speakers for Internet Librarian 2006 is out. Deadline is March 22, and the theme is "Integrated Experiences: Compelling Content Combinations". I attended Internet Librarian for the first time last year and really enjoyed it, not only for the wonderful location (Monterey CA), but even moreso for the excellent content. If at all possible, I'll be there again this year. The conference runs Oct 23-25, 2006.
As noted on BoingBoing, Mike Godwin has written a DRM primer for librarians. It's a 44-page PDF hosted on the ALA website. Haven't read it yet, but if/when I need it, now I know where it is. Digital Rights Management - a Guide for Librarians.
Technorati Tags: DRM, copyright
My 
campus comix shop has been good enough to order in a few copies of the first two issues of
Rex Libris for
A number of positive reviews and support from an enthusiastic librarian community spread the good word about Rex Libris, and the series continues to be a strong seller. Also available now is a Rex Libris poster (12 x 17"), featuring Rex in the manner of Uncle Sam, demanding, "Have You Returned Your Library Books?" A Rex Libris Ordo Bibliotheca T-shirt will be available shortly, and a limited edition Rex Libris statuette will be released in summer 2006.
Just checked and did indeed find the first two issues on Amazon, though you'll be waiting 4-6 weeks to receive them. I didn't see the poster for sale there.
IMHO the innaugural issue was better than the second one, but hey, I'll still have to get the entire collection, right? As an aside, I really love PubSub, which is how I found out about this press release. Keep up the good work Steven!
Technorati Tags: librarians
When I first followed this link I found in one of my referring log files I was worried that this was simply a marketing site, as they seemed to be pushing a 50% discount on one of the reviewed products. I was very pleasantly surprised though, to find a really nice in-depth comparison of 4 screencasting tools, complete with lots of examples of the output results of each one. Covered in detail are Camtasia Studio, BB FlashBack, Macromedia Captivate, and Qarbon ViewletCam. Mentioned briefly in the "other" category are Qarbon ViewletBuilder, TurboDemo, InstantDemo, Wink, DemoBuilder, and Envision. If you're still on the fence about one product or another, or are simply curious about how the output from these products looks this is a great page to visit. I think I'm going to have to explore the rest of the site and the forums to see if there are other gems around.
Keep in mind that these reviews were performed in June 2005...
ScreenCasters from DonationCoder.com
Technorati Tags: Screencasting
I really haven't had a chance to explore the enhancements, but today TechSmith released version 3.1 of Camtasia Studio for screencasting. You can read all about it, and watch a 30-minute screencast (made with 3.1) that demos the enhancements on the Visual Lounge blog. Looks pretty nice for the advanced user.
Technorati Tags: screencasting
Libraries411 grabs your location and draws a Google or Yahoo map of the immediate area with pushpins for all the Public Libraries in the vicinity. This would be a really useful tool for distance students if it also included Academic Libraries. And what if we (librarians) could interact with it so we could also display notes about our usage policies for outside users? I think I'll send them an email and see what it would take to implement either of these... Found via ResourceShelf by way of Science Library Pad.
A little late on re-publishing this from the OFFCAMP list, but Rob Morrison, Chair of the DLS Guidelines Committee writes about an upcoming workshop at ALA Midwinter:
Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services
Interactive Workshop
ALA Midwinter Conference
Saturday, January 21, 1:30-3:30 pm
Hotel Menger, Ballroom A
ACRL Distance Learning SectionHelp brainstorm ideas and draft new language in this hands-on workshop where we will tackle issues including technology, accessibility, services, and many others. This is an opportunity to provide your input on professional Guidelines for serving distance learners.
You can view proposed changes at this web site: http://caspian.switchinc.org/~distlearn/committees/guidelines/revisions1105.html
Copies of the current print Guidelines will be available.
Note that there will be a second workshop at the OCLSC conference in Savannah in April.
Not sure how this one slipped by me, but this article from a reputable source dates from August, 2005, and describes the Google Purge project. Interesting concept - wonder if any libraries have tried this?
Another Steven with which to agree - this time at Library Stuff, where Steven points out that just making files available as a downloadable mp3 but at a different URL each month does not a podcast make. I would add this to my list of subscribed podcasts in a heartbeat, but I'm not going to go search it out each month! (note, the link to the mp3 is in the upper right - just at the end of the first paragraph.
Stephen posts about a Bill Gates quote in which Bill claims students will all be using electronic textbooks within 4-5 years. Stephen thinks not, at least not that quickly, and I agree. Just too many different formats and DRM non-standards out there to make this work even within 5 years, IMHO. I can see some textbooks being available this way, but not all. I hope I'm wrong though. :-)
Earlier this week Geoff Harder gave an online talk about RSS. I had to miss it, but just got a chance to look at the slides he used during the talk. He started by explaining how the consumption of RSS feeds can help with the following two afflictions: NADD and RII. NADD is Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder and RII is Repetitive Information Injury, and I've got 'em both. It feels better to be able to put a name on these problems. From the RII page:
The drug addict analogy works here on a non-life-threatening-level. You are, by definition, addicted to information if you consider yourself a sufferer of NADD and RII shows up when you've lost the ability to moderate that consumption. Knowing you're in this state is step number one to unsticking yourself.And there are actually a few tips offered on how to combat RII. Good time for another NY Resolution...
As I was browsing around the Educause site looking for something for the previous post, I tripped across this Jan/Feb 2006 Educase Review article titled: Changing a Cultural Icon: The Academic Library as a Virtual Destination. Here's the abstract:
Deep into the digital age, academic libraries have relinquished much of their fundamental and sustaining role. For most people, including academicians, the library—in its most basic function as a source of information—has become overwhelmingly a virtual destination.It's written by Jerry Campbell, CIO and Dean of University Libraries at UCLA, and I think this is an important article. The question is what will become of the academic library in the next decade? I loved the quote from Clifford Lynch from 1997, in which he says,
"Now that we are starting to see, in libraries, full-text showing up online, I think we are very shortly going to cross a sort of a critical mass boundary where those publications that are not instantly available in full-text will become kind a second-rate in a sense, not because their quality is low, but jmust because people will prefer the accessibility of things they can get right away..."No kidding! Mention of the launch of Google Book Search and the Open Content Alliance. See where this is going? Who's going to need a physical library soon? The bulk of the article is taken up with a discussion of 7 (is this the magic Educause number?) "creative and useful services that have eveloved within academic libraries in the digital age". Jerry feels that "some or one of them may indeed prove to hold the key to the future of the academic library." They are; Providing quality learning spaces, Creating metadata, Offering virtual reference services, Teaching information literacy, Choosing resources and managing resource licenses, Collecting and digitizing archival materials, and Maintaning digital repositories.
Found via the Kept-up Academic Librarian, the latest in the Educause series of "7 Things You Should Know About": 7 Things You Should Know About Collaborative Editing Tools (2 page PDF). Collaborative Editing Tools include things like wikis and Writely, but this factsheet doesn't mention any tools by name; it starts with a scenerio and then moves on to discuss the following topics: 1) What is it? 2) Who's doing it? 3) How does it work? 4) Why is it significant? 5) What are the downsides? 6) Where is it going? 7) What are the implications for teaching and learning? Very nice way to get up to speed.
Incidentally, some of the other topics in the 7 Things series might be of interest to you as well: Instant Messaging, Augmented Reality, Blogs, Video Blogging, Wikis, Podcasting, Clickers, Social Bookmarking.
I'm doing some work updating files etc and ran across the handout Sherri and I made for Internet Librarian 2005. There's nothing you haven't seen in here, but it is all in one spot and attractively presented :-).
Web Tools for 21st-Century Learners (PDF - 3 pages)
Canadian copyright legal scholar Michael Geist writes about a mini version of the Google Book Search copyfight happening in Newfoundland. "The President of the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador has expressed concern that the plan will make it harder to sell books." Sigh. Michael points out that it's more likely people will find out about the books for the first time and then want to buy them.
The University of Calgary also has a couple of heritage digitization projects, one called Our Future Our Past: the Alberta Heritage Digitization Project, and the other, in conjunction with the Université Laval in Quebec (among others), called Our Roots. I do know that copyright permission is obtained for everything that's scanned and posted on these two sites, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has raised a red flag about potential lost sales.
"CIT Infobits is an electronic service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Center for Instructional Technology. Each month the CIT's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators." - http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/I've been a subscriber for a long time, and usually find at least one new thing in each issue. The December issue is particularly interesting with two mentions of significant distance ed articles. The first is a study from the e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology, in which 76,866! distance students were compared to the same number of traditional students to see how effective distance learning was. The second article comes from the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, entitled "Addressing Faculty Concerns About Distance Learning". Good stuff.
The Google Video Store has launched with paid content. I haven't visited Google Video for some time, so a lot of this may have been in there for a while now, but I thought I'd see what was available for the search library or libraries, and got 1,171 results! There seems to be a whole series of profiles of public libraries around the US, but there are also introductions to library skills and research for sale. Of those 1,171 results, you can buy 17 of them. Most of those come from the Nobel Video Library, but there are in fact three videos, Library Skills, A Kid's Guide to the Library, and A First Look at your Library Media Center, that can be purchased for between $2.49 and $4.99. Very interesting. I wonder if someone would buy one of my screencasts for a nickel?
There are 42 hits on a search for distance education or distance learning, all of which are available for free. Except fully half of those are a 21-part series on Hypnotherapy Certification from The Orca Institute. Most, but not all, of the rest seem to be promo-type spots for distance education opportunities at various institutions.
What an interesting resource for the distance student. One of the more difficult types of resources for us to obtain for our distance students is video content, and while the pickings are currently a little slim online, they'll only improve with time, and before you know it students will be able to access high quality resources via the web. Got a student who's looking for information about the Rainbow Warrior? Why not include the results of a Google Video search, which include a few free pieces from Greenpeace on the 20th Anniversary bombing of the ship?
We're going to have to starting putting together new guides to evaluating online content. I don't think I've seen any that address how to tell if a video is propaganda or authoritative!
BTW, the Google Video bookmarklet that I built one year ago(!) still works with the Google Video Store.
Technorati Tags: Google, Video, Bookmarklet, Libraries, DistanceEducation
Michael at The Information Literacy Land of Confusion points to inflite :: University of Evansville Libraries Tutorial. This is a tutorial that combines elements from TILT and SearchPath. I haven't gone through it all, but it looks nice and might provide some inspiration.
Back in August I noted a study that showed only one in 10 visitors used the RSS feed provided by blog sites. Alex Barnett now points to another study by Yahoo (PDF) released in October 2005 that shows similar numbers. Apparently there was some confusion about this report on Slashdot because people were picking up on one key number and not reading the whole report. Alex takes pains to note that in this study, 4% of users knew they were using an RSS feed, while "27% of internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology."
It's still a big minority, and I continue to espouse the virtues of offering your readers an RSS-to-email option :-)
Thanks to Geoff for the pointer to the Barnett page.
Technorati Tags: RSS
As far as I know, it's not yet possible to call a Skype account from a landline phone, but Voice Over IP (VOIP) is definately a way for you to reach your distance students on the cheap. IPEVO is now offering a handset for $30 that plugs in to your PC or Mac and allows you to use your Skype account as though you were on the phone. This is going to be really useful when your students can pick up their phone and call your Skype account at no cost to them! Goodbye paying for a toll-free line!
Technorati Tags: Skype
Lifehacker points to these two useful posts today. The first is a blog software comparison chart from the Online Journalism Review. If you're thinking about starting a blog as your New Year's resolution, this chart may be helpful in deciding which software to use. One thing it doesn't include is the cost though, so you'll have to do some additional research on that front. I guess you won't have to do much research though, as the chart accompanies an article that does include pricing and additional useful information.
The second post looks at 50(!) free file sharing services. Long ago I looked at YouSendIt, which can be used to send very large files (poor-man's electronic document delivery) to other people w/o breaking an email inbox. Turns out there are at least 50 of these services, and they're all free! This list comes from the CreativeGuy, who notes, "Today, I have a list of 50 similar services that are absolutely free and require no e-mail registration to use. Included in the list are file size limits, download limits and the amount of time the file remains on the server for download."
Excellent - definately keeping this one tucked away for future reference.
As an aside, I'm posting this using Performancing for the first time - it's pretty darn slick! The only thing I don't see here is the ability to trackback, so I may have to enter with the native interface to plug those in...
Technorati Tags: blogsoftware, filesending
