LibCasting

At Internet Librarian 2006 in Monterey on Wed. Oct. 25 at 11:30, I’m leading an interactive Training Tutorial Tour looking at a variety of screencasting tutorials as well as other library tutorials. I hope the audience will participate in identifying strengths and weaknesses of each. I’ll be curious to see if we all agree on them. And I hope it will help us be more aware of what techniques work.

Here’s my preliminary list of tutorials to view, in case anyone planning on attending the session has a chance to look at these ahead of time.

• NYU: How to find a book, HTML and Video versions
• Yale: Researching a Topic in 4 Easy Steps
• UIUC: Reserves Tutorials
• TILT: Texas Information Literacy Tutorial

Notes and comments on Writeboard (pass of monterey)

Techsmith has updated Camtasia Studio to version 4. While I have yet to download the new version to try it, there are some nice sounding features like more output formats, including m4v for podcasts, improved audio editing capabilities, production previews, open ended survey questions, extending end frames to fit added audio, closed captioning, and more. Paul mentioned the release and a first look from Digital Inspiration.

With all the new features comes a higher price for educational users ($199 instead of $149). The upgrade price for educational users is $89.50. I was hoping for less expensive pricing that that, especially with competition from free products like Wink. I’m also disappointed that version three never fixed the looping bug. Users of version 3 should not have to upgrade to get that fixed, and even more discourage is a report on 10/17 in that thread that the bug continues even in version 4!

Paul points out that Adobe is now shipping Captivate 2 and that Techsmith will have version 4 of Camtasia Studio out soon (next week if they stay on schedule). I’m hoping to see that both find the balance between being even easier to use and adding more features and capabilities.

I have mostly been adding content into the pages (the top tabs and also links from the Pages section in the sidebar to the right). I’ll use those to add links to screencasts and notes about the process, software, hardware, etc.

After creating screencasts and exploring screencast software for the past year and a half, I have been wanting to put some of my materials online. I have been teaching several half day workshops on creating screencasts, “Creating Online Tutorials in Less Than 30 Minutes,” and I plan to use this experimental blog to share my notes and to get feedback from attendees and others about their screencasting experiences.

I plan on adding in some links to other blog posts, news items, and Web pages that I’ve gathered over the past year. I may date those posts earlier than today’s date just so I can keep track of when they happened.