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the afternoon preconference workshop that I attended, “Creating Online Tutorials Wednesday, 22 March 2006 2:29 am

Posted by Dongmei in Library Instruction, free/Open Source Software.
2 comments

in Less Than 30 Minutes?” by Greg Notess, the guy of “Search Engine Showdown“.

Is it possible to create well-planned library tutorials (with audios) in 30 minutes? I guess you have to ask Greg yourself. To me, for quick and dirty ones, it’s possible … but well-planned, well-executed library tutorials, I don’t think so :-(

A new term (at least to me), screencast/screencasting … check out Jon Udell’s Screencasting Bookmarks (http://del.icio.us/judell/Screencasting)

Greg indicated that there are commercial and free software out there for screen capture and voice recording, the best options are still those commercial ones (Camtasia Studio, Macromedia Captivate, etc.). (This kind of echoes with my opinion, in an email sent out to my ref folks at CofC quite a while ago, I stressed that we should invest some money in some tutorial software that’s popular and suit our needs, based on my former experiences with Captivate, Viewlet, and some reviews of this type of software).
He gave quite a few examples of tutorials created using each software that he mentioned in the workshop.

Interestingly enough, he seems to like Camtasia a lot, while I remember in one of the review article that I forwarded to my colleagues in an email quite a while ago, they seem to favor Captivate over Camtasia. (I have to dig that review out).

A free software “Wink” (www.debugmode.com/wink) is worth to check out, even though it currently can record only screen actions, no sound, yet (but savvy tech folks may want to combine with Audacity or other audio recording tool/software).

For more updates and software options, watch this wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast).

He gave a lot screencasting planning tips, recording tips (for audio, video, and error handling).

For usability and planning, he mentioned the TUSCWOG (Tutorial Using Screen Capture Working Group).

Here are a few sites to watch for screencasting news:

Steven Cohen’s “Advanced Weblogs” workshop at CIL06 (Computers in Libraries conference 2006, DC) Wednesday, 22 March 2006 1:34 am

Posted by Dongmei in blogs and blogging, wikis.
1 comment so far

Hello from Washington DC,

Today I attended two preconference workshops, this was the first one, “Advanced Weblogs: Applications, Technology, Cases”, given by the editor of Library Stuff, Steven Cohen.

I’ve learned quite a few tricks from his workshop, I’m not going to blog about all the details of his workshop since (almost) everything he talked about in the workshop is on the wiki that he created.

Here are a few tips and tricks that I learned:

  • a new browser called Maxthon, besides some of the cool features (which I have to explore once the conference is over), you’ll have the option to hide the ads on a Web page (so if you created a wiki using the free version of the pbwiki software that has ads on the wiki pages, you can use this paticular browser if you don’t want to see the ads);
  • a good idea to set up some posting and commenting guidelines for your blog, check out Charlene Li’s guidelines for her blog, may well be adapted to a librarian’s guidelines for posting and commenting;
  • automatic posting and notification systems (APNS)
  • Ping technology (I haven’t paid much attention to this in my blog, I guess the technology is similiar to ping in UNIX system, I allow pings in this blog);
  • besides Weblogs.com, Technorati, Feedster, there are also Pingoat, Ping-o-matic, Pings.ws (if you allow/enable pings in your blog, it will send notification of new blog post to these centralized service);
  • APNS will get your content out into the blogosphere quicker (instantaneously), great for marketing (your blog);
  • the whole library website is a blog (interesting concept!), check out the Ann Arbor Public Library! Besides a Teens blog, take a look at the Director’s Blog!
  • I really like the idea of adding a catalog search box on a blog (esp. if it’s a library blog), check out the Johnson County Library’s blog;
  • IM presence (check out the Lansing Library);
  • How to display RSS feeds
    • Feed2js; Magpie; RSS Mix;
    • RSS Mix is great, you can combine several feeds into one, then you can embed it on your library’s Web site;
  • some libraries are making full use of RSS
  • Can’t get everything via RSS
    • Watch That Page http://www.watchthatpage.com
    • Dodgeit http://www.dodgeit.com
  • And always remember, and I agree 100%, CONTENT IS KING! No matter how fancy your blog gets, if you don’t have great content, you’ll have no readers!

    • That’s all for this post! I tried to summarize what I learned in 3 hours in one post (and you know what happens … ) and I’ve been writing this for 2 hours, literally wrote from yesterday (23:06 or 11:06pm) to today (01:11 or 1:11am) :-)

    I hope that you find this informative and interesting, if not (or you want more info), check out Steven Cohen’s wiki about this workshop (http://stevenmcohen.pbwiki.com/CIL2006).