The conclusion? “The results of this study indicate that screencasts facilitate student learning. By viewing instructional screencasts, most students learn how to successfully complete a multi-step research process, such as the series of tasks in this study. Most students are able to transfer their knowledge of the concepts involved in the process and apply it in new scenarios.” While this is a limited study it does show that instructional screencasts can be successful.

Not to sound too negative to this screencast, I do like a couple of other aspects of the CrossLoop demo:

• Small size (video window about 320×240 pixels, delivered by default as a pop-up)
• The way it zooms in to the relevant section (it looks to me like it was created with Camtasia Studio 5 using the new SmartFocus pan and zoom feature.

For me, this is a good example of how adding music may turn out to take too much time and energy to find an engaging track that is not distracting from the information content.

The disadvantage is that viewers lose the controls of a standard video file. The stop, rewind, and replay functions are not easily available. I toyed with the idea of using a small .swf-based video instead of the animated .gif. But that takes much more work to get all the appropriate coding on the page, the JavaScript in the header, and all the embed codes working correctly. Despite their documentation’s claims, I did not find an easy way to use Camtasia’s ExpressShow to embed the small video on my page when I host it on my own site. If I use Camtasia’s option to upload to screencast.com, then I get a much easier embed code snippet to use. Trying that here in WordPress, it pastes fairly well, but for an unknown reason to me, it runs the 14 second video in about 3 seconds. Assuming that it ran correctly, I’m curious as to which version most people would prefer to see on a page like my search bookmarklets page.

I have been fairly pleased with the results of my second Demofuse tour. According to Demofuse, the tour has been viewed (or at least started) well over 400 times in the last month. Compared to the very sparse turn out we had for in-person new site tours, the online approach succeeded far better.

We will probably take this down soon, but I wonder if I will be using any more Demofuse tours. I am concerned that the Demofuse site still has a footer with a 2007 date, their toll free number now advertises a an adult phone number, and their blog link is dead. I’ve sent email to them to see if they plan to maintain and develop the site.

So you may consider using it for a short term project, if you do it soon. Or you might try a similar site I just came across called Amberjack. I have yet to try using it, but the example on their site is similar to Demofuse, although it seems a bit slower and less elegant.

• Searching SEC’s Edgar
• BRB’s Public Record Research System
• U.S. Party/Case Index at PACER

One complaint I’ve had with Jing is that once I install it, by default it stays loaded all the time. You see a small half yellow circle at the top of the screen and an icon in the system tray. You can change those settings, but assuming that anyone trying the software always wants to have Jing loaded seems a bit presumptuous. And it is annoying that you have to guess what the icons mean (no text is displayed). It is fun how it moves and grows as you mouse over it, but text would make it easier!

I’d be meaning to spend more time with Jing, so I’ve finally created a quick screencast comparing the same search at various search engines. While I miss the editing controls in Camtasia and the variety of publishing options, Jing does have one strength missing from Camtasia, Captivate, and Wink. With the hosting at screencast.com, it makes it easy to embed a screencast in a blog post. Just share the screencast from Jing (which uploads it to screencast.com) and then log in to your account at screencast.com and click “share” (again with the word-less icon) to get the URL, link code, embed code, and an option to send email invitations to view it.

So here it is, embedded in this blog, assuming it plays well with WordPress. Note that I tried to make sure I had enough text to move it down below the right navigation page content. It automatically keeps the screencast at the recorded resolution (much easier to read than the YouTube and other video sharing sites). Usually, there is a nicer image on the first screen. I’m not sure what caused the problem on this one, but it shows the problem with not being able to edit it. If, due to bandwidth limits, nothing is displayed below, try the backup.)

Some times when I edited and then viewed this, the right navigation content got pushed down to the bottom of the page. It seems that in WordPress, when I edit the message after pasting the embed code in code view, the code gets messed up. It seems that I just need to re-paste the code that screencast.com gives as my last step in editing this post.

This Camtasia-produced screencast is hosted on TechSmith’s Screencast.com, which is a fee-based system. It does not have an embed option like YouTube, and only provides HTML code for a fairly standard link. It would be nice if Camtasia provided a way to embed a screencast as easily as YouTube does, but with the higher quality.

So, I thought I might try Wink instead. I fairly quickly downloaded and installed Wink. Then I just recorded the steps as I wrote them up in a draft email as well. Then I produced the screencast and uploaded it to a Web server (fortunately, I did have access to my work Web server from the reference desk). Then I sent the email along with a link to the screencast (0.8MB, 1:10). I could have taken more time to add call-outs, but I thought it better to respond more quickly. I tried to make sure that each step was clear and had a couple seconds between. It seemed to work, at least based on the email thank-you response I received. I wonder if other situations like this will crop up. If so, that’s another reason to learn to be able to produce screencasts quickly.