The Distant Librarian

Macromedia Captivate - First Impressions

For a long time now I've wanted to compare my favorite tutorial-building tool, Qarbon ViewletBuilder, to Macromedia Robodemo.  Well I waited so long Macromedia came out with a new product called Captivate, and during this slow week before Christmas I finally took some time to give it a test drive.  I hope to build the exact same presentation in ViewletBuilder and Captivate to compare them side by side, but I may not get to that before the new year.

In a nutshell, I'm impressed with Captivate.

I wanted to jump in w/o reading any manuals, because that's how I learned ViewletBuilder (it was that simple).  I think someone starting cold with this sort of software will be intimidated by all the options Captivate offers; I didn't find it nearly as intuitive as ViewletBuilder, but after an hour or so I became quite comfortable with it and realized that the advantage of the extra options is much greater flexibility.

Here are some of the things Captivate offers that Viewletbuilder doesn't (at least not nearly as easily):

• Resizing the whole movie after the fact (after original capture)
• Ability to play music throughout the whole thing (I like the idea of a nice classical background track running through a tutorial :-)
• Ability to manually move the mouse, regardless of where it was during the initial capture
• Screen reader compliant (for the visually impaired)
• $199 USD for educational license (I think I saw somewhere that it may be even cheaper if purchased in bulk).  ViewletBuilder also offers educational pricing, but they no longer post it on their website.  I think I paid about $199 for their product several years ago.

Captivate, being a Macromedia product, offers really nice integration of Flash components.  You can easily include some animated text, and even regular text can be presented with some nice fades and other effects.  That's just window dressing for the most part, but it does lead to a pretty professional-looking end result.

While I haven't played with them yet, I also see features for easily adding all sorts fo quiz features, from Likert scales to multiple choice to fill in the blank.  Good for interactivity!  ViewletBuilder also offers some of this, but Macromedia's appears to be more advanced, and again to offer more options.

And the last thing I noticed is how much more flexible the audio is.  With both products you can record narration for each individual slide (which is so much better than having to record straight through from start to finish!), but with Captivate you can edit the audio after the fact (volume, insert silence, chop out a section); with ViewletBuilder your only choice is to re-record the whole slide.

So my initial summary is that Captivate appears to be a much more polished product, and offers quite a few more features than my old standby.  Will 2005 be the year that I switch products?  Might very well be!  I'll post more when I have the side-by-side comparison done, and I'll let you see the end results as well. Happy Holidays!

Course Management Systems - EduTools

A couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to land on a campus committee that was charged with re-examining whether we wanted to renew our license with WebCT, or to jump to a different CMS.  I was quite pleased that we made the switch to BlackBoard, because I found it easier to offer library support through that platform.  Of course your mileage may vary.  But if any of you are helping your institutions decide which CMS to use, this site shoudl prove enormously helpful - I wish it had existed when we were making our decision! 

Information on 64 different CMS's allowing you to compare and contrast on just about any criteria.  Nice.

Link: Course Management Systems - EduTools.

Online Assessment Tools

Sherri just posted about something called PHP Surveyor, which looks nice and nifty, but I don't know anything about PHP and SQL, and I'll be most of you don't either.  Just the other day, a colleague pointed me towards a free hosted assessment tool called FAST, which stands for (are you ready?) Free Assessment Summary Tool.  It was built just down the road at Mount Royal College here in Calgary, and pretty much offers what the name suggests.

FAST allows you to build any number of brief assessments that you can point your students to.  You can view your results in all sorts of ways, and can download to Excel.  You're limited to 20 questions, but the creators say that's to encourage higher completion rates.  Types of questions you can create: yes/no, Likert scale, multiple choice, long answer, yes/no & long answer, Likert scale & long answer.  There's a PDF brochure that shows nice screenshots and answers some FAQs about the product.

The biggest potential downside that some of you might find is that because it's hosted at Mount Royal College, that institution's logo appears at the top of the page instead of yours, but if you want to host it at your place that can be done for a price. 

There's also a nice database of suggested generic questions if you're having trouble getting started...

This is definately something I plan to start using in the New Year (my first resolution!) to help gauge the effectiveness of my online instruction.

A first look at Google Scholar: What's included and what's not

On Google Scholar points us to an information page put together by the Penn Library: A first look at Google Scholar: What's included and what's not.  Does a nice job of letting folks know what they can expect from the search engine, but they don't appear to proxy it, since they include the following points:

• When connecting to Google Scholar from an off campus computer that is not on the Penn network, this same full text may not be accessible. Instead, Google Scholar's links may lead you to an offer to purchase an article or report from the company that is providing it. You might also be directed towards a free variant edition on another website, but that might not be the same content as the version in a scholarly publication.

 

• In order to determine if the Penn Library provides free full text for these items, you will need to search through the Library's  web by using the PennText Article Finder or E-Resource Locator.

So IMHO this page could be one step better ;-)

Term Paper Help Now! The Writing Survival Guide Enters the Blogosphere

Not really a library function, but something I get asked fairly regularly by distance students.  Fortunately we have an Effective Writing Centre here on campus so I can refer students to them, but if you don't, you might bookmark or incorporate some of these links into your general support pages...

Link: E-Learning Queen: Term Paper Help Now! The Writing Survival Guide Enters the Blogosphere.

Chat's Positive Side: Reference Services Online - Carol Tenopir, Library Journal

A very short piece - won't take you any time at all to read...

Chat's Positive Side: Reference Services Online - Carol Tenopir, Library Journal "I have absolutely no regrets about enhancing our reference services through chat." "It's been a smooth and successful expansion of our existing reference service." "It's so successful we've moved from being a pilot project to an ongoing service." The

[via Online Learning Update]

Other Distant Librarians

While working on an article recently I scared up a few other blogs that are run by distance education librarians.  Just this morning another appeared thanks to a pubsub feed I have.  I thought you might be interested in these ones if you're reading mine.  Of course each of these are dedicated to a slightly different audience - not so much distance librarianship in general.  Still worth a look:

• REF:BLOG:SPOT  - actually "is the unofficial and experimental blog of the Research and Information Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries." but is coordinated by Sherri Vokey, the Remote Services Librarian at UNLV.  I knew Sherri briefly when she worked for the U of Winnipeg here in the Great White North.
• Distance Education Library Services - this is the one that just popped into my aggregator this morning, and I can't find any information about the author, other than the name "Samantha".  hey Samantha, can you drop me an email; I'd like to know who and where you are!  :-)
• Frequently Answered Questions - Rebecca Hedreen is the Distance Education Librarian at Southern Connecticut State University and runs this blog for her distance students.
• Distance Education Services at Atkins Library - maintained by Lisa T Nickel, Distance Education Librarian at J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte
• And finallay, Ilene Frank is a distance reference librarian (who teaches courses such as Lib Services Distance Learning) at the U of South Florida, and writes the Librarian's Blog - not specifically geared towards distance librarianship, but if distance librarianship is your background, how can it avoid the subject? ;-)

So those are the five that I know about - can you leave a comment if you know of other blogs with a distance librarianship slant?

IRRODL: CIDER is Born

Hmmm, interesting information for our Canadian readers.  The most recent issue of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning introduces us to a new initiative called CIDER, the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research.  It appears to be a clearinghouse for, well, distance education research in Canada.  There's pretty much nothing there yet, but I'll certainly be keeping my eye out for library content.  Or any content, to see what might be appropriate to stick up there library-wise...

With a name like CIDER, shouldn't this have been announced in October?  ;-)

Link: IRRODL: CIDER is Born.

Distance Teaching: Comparing Two Online Information Literacy Courses

From Volume 30, Issue 6 of The Journal of Academic Librarianship 
Distance Teaching: Comparing Two Online Information Literacy Courses
Pages 482-487
Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay
(These links should work if your institution has Science Dirct)

This article compares the author's experience teaching a for-credit information literacy course through two different institutions.  Lots of background on the way distance students learn, and things to pay attention to as a result.  Not so much on the specific courses, but unless you're teaching one of them that's ok :-)  A good read if you're involved in teaching or planning for a whole online course, as opposed to a one-shot deal.

Jackson Library IE Toolbar

A great idea for the distance student: a browser toolbar that provides links and access to library-specific resources.  All these nifty Google Scholar tools we've been playing with could be incorporated into something like this.  This version only works for IE :-(

Link: Stanford Graduate School of Business: Jackson Library: Jackson IE Toolbar.

Originally found via the Librarian in Black

Best Videoconferencing Solutions For Classroom-based Work: What To Choose?

Many years ago a collegue and I wrote up our experiences of using NetMeeting to deliver library instruction to distance students:

Pival, Paul R. and Johanna Tunon. “NetMeeting: A New and Inexpensive Alternative for Delivering Library Instruction to Distance Students.” College & Research Libraries News. 59(10) (November 1998), p. 758-760.

Haven't really done any experimentation with live video delivered to distance students since then, but just came across this site that should do a good job of bringing me up to speed on many of the alternatives.  The focus is on the easy and cheap stuff :-)

Link: Best Videoconferencing Solutions For Classroom-based Work: What To Choose? - Online Collaboration and Web Conferencing Breaking News - Kolabora.com.

Information Literacy and Macromedia Captivate

Ahh, the cross-pollination continues ;-)  Gary Roberts has some very positive words to say about Macromedia Captivate, which I have yet to download and play with.  He closes his post with, "My prediction is that libraries will widely adopt this application to create demonstrations for remote users."

Link: The Library I.T. Blog :: Information Literacy and Macromedia Captivate.

Google Scholar - half way there?

OK, here's where we stand on making Google Scholar (aka Schoogle) work much better for distance students.  Ross Singer from Georgia Tech has modified a bookmarklet for Google Scholar that works in Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.73 (according to my testing), and IE 6.0.   His bookmarklet furthers the work of Peter Binkley (U of Alberta) and Art Rhyno (U of Windsor).

In a nutshell, here's what the bookmarklet does.  You conduct a search using Google Scholar.  Now you click your Google Scholar OpenURL / Proxy bookmarklet and watch the screen change; in effect become localized based on your institutional affiliation.  Every result in Google Scholar now has an icon of your choosing, which when clicked will fire up your institution's Open URL link resolver (SFX in all the tested instances so far) and allow it to direct you to the most appropriate copy of the referenced item, rather than allowing Google Scholar to dictate what you have access to (pretty much nothing if you're not sitting on a university campus, probably).  In addition to calling the Open URL link resolver, it also incorporates your institution's proxy server, making the whole thing work from off campus as well.

Areas for improvement:  It's a pain to customize for each institution.  Oh, it can be done, but it's not nearly as easy as it needs to be.  We need to have a "build a custom bookmarklet" form.  We need to have a page where I can enter my institution's proxy info and Open URL link resolver info and then create a bookmarklet that includes that information.   As an added benefit, this would allow users who have multiple affiliations to have a bookmarklet for each affiliation, thus allowing them to easily check for access according to each of those affiliations.

(As an aside, maybe each link resolver window that pops up should have a reminder that Google Scholar isn't necessarily the best place to be searching for a given topic, and should provide a link back to the home library's list of databases)

And this whole bookmarklet thing, while really useful and exciting, still places too much emphasis on the end user.  We power users will use it, but I still maintain that the average distance student (or any student for that matter) will not take the time.  This is of course in no way a knock on Ross, Peter or Art; they've made an interesting product much more useful.  This is a knock on Google's door.  Google still needs to make all this work from their front door.  Until that happens, this tool will bring more anguish than pleasure to the distance student.

Can't wait to see what next week brings!  (besides crappy weather here in Calgary - sorry, couldn't resist ;-)

Full stream ahead: database instruction through online videos

Just finished a really good article in the most recent issue of Library Hi Tech:

Title: Full stream ahead: database instruction through online videos
Author(s): Daniel Yi Xiao; Barbara A. Pietraszewski; Susan P. Goodwin
Journal: Library Hi Tech
Year: 2004   Volume: 22   Issue: 4  Pages: 366-374

I believe this link should take you directly to the PDF if you're on campus and have a subscription to Library Hi Tech.

It's an account of a pretty major project (LetItV, or Learning E-Resources Through Instructional Technology Videos) they undertook at Texas A&M University Libraries to bring streaming video database tutorials to their students.  It wasn't designed just for distance students, and the team who built the project didn't even include a distance librarian, but of course the 24x7 just-in-time-instruction philosophy is what we're all about here in distance library land.

The article does a really good job of providing a philosophical background for why they chose the methods they did, and is quite detailed about how they put their project together.  As a result, I'm going to try a mixer one of these days to see if it can improve the audio quality of the tutorials I've built.

For their project they used an older version of Camtasia Studio.  I've never been a big fan of Camtasia, finding it too complex (not too hard, just more complicated than it needs to be) for the tasks I've wanted to complete.  Their output was streaming video, but they point out the new version of Camtasia can output to Flash, which I think would make the whole process much much easier for the end user.  For instance, I wasn't able to actually view their projects - either their server was down (you can read the article to get the link), or the files had been moved (that was one of the error messages I got), or I didn't have the right video players (I think I did though).  Just couldn't get any of the videos to play, so I can't tell if the streaming video has some advantage over what Flash could've done as far as output goes.  (Long-time readers may recall that I prefer the simplicity of the Qarbon Viewletbuilder for this type of tutorial, or what I think is this type of tutorial, since I couldn't actually see it ;-).

So overall I think the article is excellent and a must-read if you're planning to mount any kind of streaming video tutorial for your distance students.  They did their homework on the pedagogy, and do a great job detailing how they put their project together.  Personally I don't like how complex the end result appears to be, but it may work just fine for your students.

Oh, you can read an alternative version of this paper that was delivered a couple years ago as a presentation at a distance learning conference.  It's got screenshots too!

Distance Learning Section Meetings at Midwinter

Stephen Dew posted the following to the OffCamp Listserv the other day:

ALA has recently announced the tentative meeting times and locations for all divisions and sections at Midwinter, and I want to let everyone know about the times and tentative locations for the meetings of the Distance Learning Section, ACRL.   They are as follows:

 All Committees Meeting             Sunday, January 16, 8:30am to 11am      Sheraton, Back Bay C

Executive Committee Meeting     Sunday, January 16, 4pm to 6pm            Marriott, Wellesley

Discussion Group                      Monday, January 17, 8:30 to 10:30am     Westin, North Star

For those who are interested in getting involved with DLS, I invite you to attend the All Committees Meeting on Sunday—you will be able to meet many people, and you can get a good idea about how the committees work and how you might get involved. I would also encourage you to attend the DLS Discussion Group on Monday morning--it will give you a good idea of the types of issues and matters that we deal with.

Looking Forward to Seeing Everyone in Boston!

Stephen H. Dew
Chair of the Distance Learning Section, ACRL