The Distant Librarian

How important is audio quality in Screencasting?

Is good audio quality for your screencasts worth $100? 

I've never had a student complain that they couldn't understand what I was saying in one of my screencasts, but the other day I was experiencing some techno-lust and wondered if D'Arcy's fancy microphone would make a measurable improvement to the quality of the audio in a screencast.  Right now I use a Labtec headset microphone to record the audio in my screencasts.  So generic, there's no model number to refer to.  It was probably about $40-$50, and I've always thought it sounded just fine.  I just borrowed D'Arcy's Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone and ran a couple of quick tests.  This thing sits in a mic stand and was about a foot away from my face, compared to the labtec mic, which was almost touching my lips. 

I was worried that being so far away, the Samson wouldn't be as loud as the Labtec, but that wasn't the case at all.  I did realize how important a quiet environment is when one is using a mic on a stand though - I had to re-record when a truck's backup alarm sounded down in the parking lot and the Samson picked it up just as my ear heard it - that doesn't happen with the headset mic...

I figured the Samson microphone would sound better, but wondered if, when compressed into a flash file using Camtasia Studio, it would still sound better.  Let's listen, shall we? 

I recorded myself reading the same passage of text, first using the headset mic, then using the Samson mic.  Each reading is about 20 seconds long, and the Samson follows immediately after the headset - you'll know when it's switched.  For the first recording I chose to compress the audio using mp3 compression, 22.050 kHz, Mono, 32Kbits/second.  I don't know if this is the default for Camtasia Studio, but it's what I have always used - I think it's the highest quality mono compression in the list.

Screencasts on your Tivo?

We only oficially got Tivo here in Canada earlier this year, so this won't be a good distribution method up North for a little while yet, but Bryan Zug is reporting that it may be possible to post a video, including a screencast, to a service called Brightcove, and then have it available on your Tivo.  Bryan's post is actually a couple of months old already, and I haven't heard an buzz about Brightcove, but it's an intriguing idea.  Those of you with Tivo know how convenient it is; can't you imagine a folder containing all the screencasts pertinent to your online course, and/or library research?  Wonder what the resolution would be like.  Hey Brian, do you have Tivo?


Technorati Tags: tivo, screencasting, Brightcove

Effectively incorporating instructional media into web-based information literacy

Just finished reading the following article:

Title: Effectively incorporating instructional media into web-based information literacy
Author(s): Li Zhang
Journal: The Electronic Library
Year: 2006 Volume: 24 Issue: 3 Page: 294-306

I read it with WISPR in mind, to see how we stacked up, and I think we've done a pretty good job so far.  The article started a little weak for me, with such generics as, "The development of useful and objective-accomplished web-based library instruction should follow pedagogical principles and web design guidelines to enhance the teaching-learning transaction..."  I was more interested in what the principles and guidelines were, and a little later on they were indeed addressed.

The following web tutorial interface design topics are covered: text, color, graphics and navigation, audio and video, and interaction and feedback.  I think we could still beef up WISPR by offering some additional options in the audio/video area - alternative, downloadable formats, and perhaps some playback control on the audio-only components.  Some of these were also noted and suggested by the OCLSC audience with Shauna and I presented on WISPR earlier this year.  Definitely worth a read if you're building comprehensive web-based tutorials.


Technorati Tags: Information_literacy, tutorials, WISPR

Be here now - My Monkey Mind

"Your thoughts are scattered; your mind jumps from one thing to another like a monkey. It helps to learn and to practise concentration strategies, to harness your monkey mind, so that it works at your will."

I think I'm going to change the title of this blog to, "Hey you!  Pay Attention!" what with all the concentration-related posts I've had of late.  Must be somthing going on in my life (yeah, for like the last 10 years!).  Today brings us a really neat Student's Guide to Concentration from the University

of Kent in the UK.  Going well beyond the advice to just pay more attention, this guide explains some of the reasons concentration will wane, and offers a lot of good suggestions for improving study habits.  Of course this is perfectly relevant for the distance student who will often be studying in the home environment.

Technorati Tags: concentration, attention, monkeys

DRM through cartoons

Two related items in the same week must be a sign, so check 'em out if you haven't seen 'em yet.  Thing #1) The Pig and the Box.  From the site:

The Pig and the Box is about a pig who finds a magic box that can replicate anything you put into it. The pig becomes so protective of it, and so suspicious of anyone that wants to use it, that he makes people take their copied items home in special buckets that act as... well, they're basically DRM. It's like a fable, except the moral of the story is very modern in tone.

I made the book after hearing how the entertainment industry in Canada is keen on teaching young kids about how to "respect" copyright. That was a bit heavy-handed, I thought, and otherwise despicable. Preying on small kids, brainwashing them so they believe what you're doing is honourable and good... Feh. So I wrote this book partly as a response to that venture, to counter-act the confused ideals that young'ns are being exposed to these days. Also, I wanted to write potty humour.

The reference to the entertainment industry in Canada is of course Captain Copyright...  I have yet to share either of these sites with my 4-year old for his reaction.

Thing #2 comes from the EFF - a brief Flash movie called The Corruptibles, that explains in very simple scenerios the Audio Flag, Broadcast Flag, and the Analog Hole.

Screencasting on YouTube

Brian Mathews, The Ubiquitous Librarian, is at it again, this time exploring the idea of creating a collection of screencasts housed on YouTube, instead of on the library site.  What I really like about the work that Brian does is that he really spends some time figuring out how a given site can be used to the library's advantage.  Me?  I'm a grazer.  I've got some videos of my kids on YouTube, but I only spent enough time on the site to figure out how to post them and then I was off to something else.  Brian built a page on YouTube to house his Mechanical Engineering screencasts, and it allows comments and subscriptions and some additional social networking opportunities.

Will it be more heavily used than if he'd housed the screencasts on the library site?  Time will tell.  Is the video quality substandard to what he would've gotten had he housed them on the library site?  Yes, but as Brian notes, "The screens look fuzzy on YouTube; I had to rely on the Zoom feature to make these readable. I know a lot of folks (library people) might complain that the screens don't look perfect, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather sacrifice a little quality in order to build the concept."  He also predicts, "The technology is only going to improve. Eventually we will have crystal clear online videos, but don't wait until then."  And I like that attitude too, of course :-)

One issue that I have with YouTube, besides the current low resolution, is that my campus throttles access to the site.  Or something.  I can't just click to watch Brian's screencast; I have to wait for almost the entire thing to buffer before it's watchable by me on campus.  From home it streams right away, so maybe this is a rare instance in which the distance students will have a technological advantage over the on-campus folks.


Technorati Tags: Screencasting, YouTube

Study: Distractions Impede Learning

Followup on my post about continuous partial attention - In Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences there was a report about how distractions impede learning (Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction).  Relevant quote:

"What's new is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn to make it less efficient and useful," said Russell A. Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.  ..."in general, distraction is almost always a bad thing."

Loverly.  Take your pick of newspaper articles discussing the report.


Technorati Tags: attention, distraction, learning

A fancier way to say that

One of the first and still best reasons I blog is to keep an outboard brain - a place to jot down ideas, in this case related to my job.  I'm about a third of the way through Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (recommeded on some other blog I read), and have just read a layman's definition of "distributed cognition", which the author, David Allen, describes thusly:

"It's as if your mind were to say, "Look, I'm only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use.  If you're not collecting them in some trusted way, I won't give you that many.  But if you're actually doing something with the ideas - even if it's just recording them for later evaluation - then here, have a bunch!  And, oh wow!  That reminds me of another one, and another, " etc....  It's getting things out of your head and into objective, reviewable formats."

Doesn't "distributed cognition" sound a lot more official than "outboard brain"?  Apparently I'm not the first to make this connection between blogging and distributed cognition.  :-)


Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity, Blogging, Distributed_Cognition

Comprehensive overview of Screencasts and Screencasting in Education

Courtesy of a pointer from Stephen's Web comes a wonderful overview of Screencasts and Screencasting from Graeme Daniel of wwwtools for teachers.  Not sure why I hadn't heard of this site before, but I'm definitely watching it now.  Graeme goes way beyond the cursory compilation of links to provide a look at the history of screencasting and how it's being used in education, from K-12 to Higher Ed, for Library Users and Librarians to ICT Skills and Instructional Design.  I have to note the same thing that Stephen did; Graeme's conclusion on usability that states,

From the examples we've seen, it's obvious that current technology is up to the task of producing high-quality, quick-loading screencasts, with crisp imagery, audible and clearly enunciated sound, and a well-structured message. However, the relative ease of putting a screencast together can be something of a trap, and a considerable number of candidates for possible use as examples were discarded because they were taking forever to arrive, screenshots were too indistinct, sound levels were too low, speech was impossibly fast, or messages were poorly put together.

A little more attention to planning detail and quality control would have made a lot of difference to final usability, and ultimately to audience impact, in these cases.

Well said!  The more pedagogical(?) links in this review nicely complement the huge list of software-based links in Jeremy Wagstaff's look at the topic for the Wall Street Journal. 


Technorati Tags: Screencasts, Screencasting

Rice University Relaunches University Press - Online Only

Tim O'Reilly reports on a Wall Street Journal article about the online-only relaunch of Rich University Press.

An excerpt:

Although the new press will solicit and edit manuscripts the old-fashioned way, it won't produce traditional books. The publishing house will instead post works online at a new Web site, where people can read a full copy of the book free. They can also order a regular, bound copy from an on-demand printer, at a cost far less than picking up the book in a store.

Technorati Tags: eBooks

A distraction-free desktop

Uh-oh, it's going to be one of those days!  One of those neat days where one idea leads to another, and lots of thoughts fire in my brain.  As soon as I finished that post about continuous partial attention, I switched over to my aggregator and saw that Jon Udell is thinking about the exact same stuff!  Well, I guess he was yesterday, as his post on a distraction-free desktop shows.  He talks about two things here.  First, a new word processing program he's playing with that does nothing but display the text you're working on.  No GUI, no menus, no distractions.  Just 1980's era green screen.  (flashback to my dorm room!)  Second, he shows a screencast of his Mac desktop and describes all the ways the clutter there can be hidden, again to minimize distractions.  I've got to try some of this stuff, and I've got to find out what Jon used to produce this screencast on OSX!


Technorati Tags: attention, screencasting, desktop

Email is an attention chipper/shredder

I've got another audio recommendation for you.  Linda Stone, former VP at Microsoft, speaks about continuous partial attention, the state many of us are in where we're constantly scanning for new opportunities.  Email, cell phone, BlackBerry, IM.  When was the last time you were in a conversation with someone at work and you gave that person 100% of your attention?  It's probably not quite as bad here in libraryland as in the open marketplace, but I know I've often only given partial attention to someone.  I know that last month when I was on vacation I was able to read 1400 pages in large part because I was almost entirely unplugged, and was able to devote almost all of my attention to one task - it was great!

Linda describes how we got to this state, and gives hope that we're generally moving past this state and have started to develop the ability to filter.  "In a world of interconnected communities and constant background noise, the overriding question is: what do we really need, and what do we need to pay attention to?"

I don't think the description on the IT Conversations page does the talk justice.  It's accurate, but the talk is much more compelling.  24 minutes long, mp3 format, can be played online or downloaded.


Technorati Tags: attention, coping

Call for Chapters - casebook on online information literacy programs

As noted on the OffCamp listserv, and in A Library Writer's Blog, there is a call for chapters for an upcoming casebook on online information literacy programs.  Chapter proposals are due on or before Sept. 30, and if accepted, they'll be looking for about 15-pages by Feb 2007.

"The goal of the book is to identify and present significant and innovative online instruction programs in a straightforward, narrative way, focusing on the development, implementation, and assessment of each institution’s online information literacy instruction effort. We are not looking for research papers. We are looking for your experience. By pooling the experiences of numerous institutions and programs, large and small, we hope to provide a bank of knowledge that would serve as a resource to other institutions currently teaching IL online, as well as to those contemplating it."

More information here.


Technorati Tags: Information_Literacy, Scholarship, ACRL

36,000,000 IMs per day

Yeah, it's a big number, but it's just the drop in the bucket that Meebo processes every day - imagine how many more Instant Messages are sent in the native interfaces!  The number comes from an interesting writeup of a meeting he had with Meebo by Tim O'Reilly.  Lots of little interesting "new ways of doing business" nuggets in there.

I was sure I had mentioned Meebo in this blog before, but apparently not.  It's a nifty web-based cross-platform IM service.  That means you can access almost any of your IM accounts (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, or Jabber) via the web (no software to install, so perfect for a public computer), and if you register with Meebo you can sign in to all of them with a single sign-on.


Technorati Tags: IM, Meebo

Wiki Webcast Week

In addition to Meredith's wiki webcast this Thursday, the authors of Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom, S. Pixy Ferris and Hilary Wilder, will be participating in a free webcast for Innovate, the Journal of Online Education.  This is a neat idea in that Innovate invites people to interact with the authors of the articles it publishes.  Their webcast is tomorrow, Tuesday July 11th at 1:00pm EDT.  If you wish to participate in the webcast, please register at http://www.uliveandlearn.com/PortalInnovate/.

Technorati Tags: wikis

An introduction to Screencasting - SirsiDynix Institute

Just posted on the SirsiDynix Institute future seminars page is notice of my Wed, Nov 8 session entitled Show and Tell the Easy Way - an Introduction to Screencasting.  It runs from 11am-12 EST (8-9am PST) and should also be available after the fact as a recorded session and audio-only podcast, though I do plan to do a fair amount of show and tell, so I'm not sure how useful the podcast will end up being.  We'll see.  From the blurb:

This presentation will introduce screencasting, the software that is available to create screencasts, and the platforms on which they can be run. You'll learn how to plan a recorded procedure (the most time-consuming, yet often overlooked step) and get tips for making effective and engaging screencasts.

I'll remind y'all again as the date approaches :-)


Technorati Tags: Screencasting, SirsiDynix

I'm currently #6...

The other day I was poking around on the Haworth website trying to answer a question about the current status of the Journal of Library and Information Services in Distance Learning, when I stumbled across this page showing the top ten articles that have been downloaded from this title (any institution with a paper subscription is supposed to be able to access the electronic version as well).  As of today my paper describing why I started this blog was the 6th most downloaded article.  Even better, a paper I solicited for the journal is currently sitting at #3.


Technorati Tags: blogging

Wiki Webcast - SirsiDynix Institute

Next week Meredith Farkas is giving a webcast all about wikis in libraries and you can attend for free.  Why would you attend?  "Because you want to learn more about wikis and hwo they can be used in libraries."  Thursday, July 13th at 11am EDT.  The presentation will be recorded and be made available later both as an audio-only podcast, and as a full presentation you can play back via the web.


Technorati Tags: wikis, webcast, SirsiDynix

Streaming Media Magazine review of Captivate and Camtasia

My colleague Jennifer went to SLA and brought me back the May 2006 issue of trade magazine Streaming Media, which has a review / comparison of Captivate and Camtasia  Studio.  The article's not online, nor is it in any of the major aggregators.  :-(  Jan Ozer is the author, and it appears that he's giving a workshop on this same topic and products next month at the 22nd Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison next month.

Jan really likes the quiz options and fine control that Captivate offers, but feels that Camtasia's the better choice for everyday whip-it-out productions.

"If you're a video editor, you'll find Camtasia easy to learn and use, and Captivate unecessarilty complex.  On the other hand, if you're skilled in Macromedia Director or Flash, you'll find Camtasia a blunt intrument and Captivate more intuitive and precise." 

In the end, unable to see how either program bests the other across the board, Jan concludes that "it really is hard to imagine living without either one".

UPDATE: The review is now available online.

Beaming Books

An interesting, very brief article from Technology Review (May 2006, Vol 109(2) p 21-22) entitled Beaming Books.  The abstract, from Academic Search Premier:

This article discusses a project of a Swiss foundation called BioVision to promote the use of handheld computers at schools around the globe in 2006. At the Mbita Point primary school on the Kenya-Uganda border, the foundation installed a satellite receiver at the school, gave out handheld computers running Linux-based software, and downloaded up-to-date curricula from the Kenyan education ministry. BioVision says this approach is far cheaper than buying books every year. BioVision has passed the project, called EduVision, on to a venture capital firm called Bridgeworks, which hopes to turn it into a self-sustaining business.

There are two ways (at least) to think of distance students - the individuals in the wilderness, and those who's countries or regions (Outback, Great White North) are in the technological wilderness.  This project could certainly help those in the latter...

If you have Academic Search Premier, this link should take you right to the article.


Technorati Tags: eBooks

Brief Survey on Document Delivery / Interlibrary Loan

Michelle at Western Michigan University has a very brief survey on how your students access Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery systems at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=120282309518.  It's only 8 questions long - can you take a moment to fill it out for her?


Technorati Tags: document_delivery, surveys