Back in February I announced the COPPUL ANimated Tutorial Sharing Project (ANTS), but noted that the COPPUL Directors had not given us the green light to open the project to non-COPPUL libraries. Well gang, the light has turned green, and while I've been meaning to tell you that for a couple weeks now, a recent post by Chad on Library Voice about sharing screencast sourcecode seems to prove that the time is ripe.
To refresh your memory, ANTS makes use of a wiki at the Univerisity of Winnipeg and the DSpace repository here at the U of Calgary to coordinate the sharing of source code for animated tutorials, aka screencasts. If I build a tutorial that you like, you can grab the original source code and modify it to suit your institution. While our effort at coordination may look a little indimidating (we have guidelines 'n stuff), it's really mostly common sense, so shouldn't prove to be a burden to anyone who wants to contibute.
And this is your invitation! Have you built a screencast for one of the databases on the wiki? How about one that's not on the wiki? (that's just our list of databases we felt would be most useful within COPPUL libraries). Why not share your source code? It's easy. I'm the administrator for the DSpace collection, so I'll review your submission before it's committed to the archive, and I'll let you know if there's anything amiss, so it's a friendly contact you'll have :-) Right now have just under two dozen tutorials up there. Go ahead and take a peek, and borrow any that you might find useful for your institution. There are even a couple in French. Like Chad, we are also using a Creative Commons 2.5 license on these puppies.
Thanks in advance - off to let all the other wikis know about this project...
Technorati Tags: screencasting, sharing, ANTS
