CogBlogged Tagged ‘screencasts’

Well Scott, since you asked for it, a few weeks late, I did a hasty screencast this morning of poking through my Google Reader feeds, not as quickly as D’Arcy did with his use of Blogbridge. But I did pick up on Dr. Norman’s method, and got me a copy of iShowU which seems to do a nifty job of screen/audio recording on Mac OSX — it does not save as Flash, but I crunched it a bit in QuickTime Pro to knock off some MB weight (for a smaller dimension movie, I switched my screen res to 800×600 and did full screen at that set). My Google Reader Screencast [10.3 Mb, 6:03] I am still utterly humbled at the masters of screencasting — it is very much an art to not only get a great recording, but to orchestrate it so as to be interesting, not a fumbling mumbling [...]

Not everyone can afford Camtasia and screencast like a pro. And it is PeeCee only. There are other ways to do simple presentations of how to do tasks on a computer. Someone named “djweinstein” has done some elegant tutorials on how to do things in Audacity, by posting them as a flickr set, which can then be viewed as a slideshow- here is a snapshot from time shift– a tutorial that “illustrates a technique for sequencing audio tracks using Audacity’s time shift tool.” Also in the mix is another one on Audacity Tutorial (Amplification/Normalization). It would appear to be as simple as to outline the list of steps in a process, do a screen shot for each, edit each image with some overlay text, upload in flickr, and arrange in a slide set. Nicely done, indeed. Simple, use an existing tool (flicr) in a nocely new way. Nicely done, djweinstein. [...]

Shazam! Sit back and watch/listen to Brian Lamb’s first screen cast, “Beyond the Blog”, a whirlwind tour of weblogs, wikis, RSS, aggregators, flickr, social software, and more. Best quip, “Think of delicious as blogging without writing a weblog”. Awesome work, Brian, and your fans shall clamor for more.

Blogging (for me) is a stream of consciousness, not a definitive final answer, but something evolving. In my recent playing with screencasts I leaped to pitching it as another flavor of digital storytelling… but driving in today I was thinking it was a wrong leap… what Jon Udell has done so brilliantly with his screencasts is to provide a low intensive way (audio narrated over streaming flash screen captured activity) of doing guided tours of software, web sites, etc… and in a way much more effective than writing about it or creating FAQs, etc. Screencasts, in his vein, are really just that- a broadcast of some screen action. I am not trying to hammer out or argue over defintiions, but in my attempts to use the same/similar tools for telling a story , it sort of works, but bleeds into other terrains beyond screen action. Hey it was just a [...]

I should be working on other things, but I get a technology bug under my skin. After publishing my first screencast and getting some quick feedback, some of my own, I wanted to take myself to task and do something beyong screencasting as just tours of software. Creating “How-tos” for using RSS, or a course management system, or some other technology is fine, but it is not all that interesting to me. What is more interesting is using technology to create stories, compelling things. In this entry, I will share a quick digital story I created with simple tools, and in a short time frame (shorter if were not for my own boneheaded blunders). I deliberately created the basic slide show in PowerPoint, not because I love it, but because it is prevalent.

After posting about my first (sloppy) screencast, I emailed Jon Udell via his blog to ask about his tools. An impressive sidenote- he responded directly less than 2 hours after I sent, as compared to a feedback form on say a phone company or other mega corporate site staffed with hundreds where they reply with an automated message teling you someone will respond in 72 hours… and that reply is for the most part cut and paste flaff. Anyhow, Jon uses Camtasia Studio 2 as well, writing: For most stuff I’m using Camtasia Studio, which enables me to do a fair amount of editing (not as much or as easily as I’d like) and produce pretty well-compressed SWF. WME is fine for capture, about as effective as Camtasia, but obviously lacks the editing and SWF production aspects. I hadn’t heard about Swish, that’s good to know about. Ultimately there are [...]

So it was time to put my money where my snout was… After waffling about screencasting, I decided to give it a go. Downloading the Windows Media Encoder was not too bad. I played a bit, not really sure of the various settings for the encoding. Anyhow, I recorded an 11 minute quick attempt at showing wide range of RSS feeds we provide in the Maricopa Learning eXchange, and then how you can copy them over to our Feed2JS site, create a cut and paste JavaScript, and then put them into a site. I sketched out my topics, figured out which URLs to have open in Firefox (you have to love tabbed browsing, apparently that has not boarded the cluetrain in the MSIE shop), and gave it a go. I am not nearly as smooth as Jn Udell, and one of my demo links was kafloooey (bad), but oh well. [...]