Monthly Archives: September 2014

Would you watch it? Creating Effective & Engaging Video Tutorials

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A Blended Librarians Online Learning Community Webcast, September 18, 2014

Nichole Martin & Ross MartinPresented by Nichole Martin and Ross Martin, Librarians at Seminole State College of Florida

Dawn Cadogan, Jennifer Lanzing, and myself, members of the new Pedagogy and Learning Objects Workgroup, gathered to participate in a webinar on web tutorial creation offered by Blended Librarians titled : Would you watch it? Creating Effective & Engaging Video Tutorials. The presenters, librarians at Seminole State College of Florida, have a very large contingent of distance programs to support. They have extensively studied online video production and presented on all aspects they have learned and employed to produce the most effective and engaging videos. Their presentation was concise and full of lessons learned.

Types of video tutorials they have used

Screencasts: captures your computer screen, mouse motions, may include audio. Research shows that students respond well to this type of tutorial. They are very effective for novice learners in providing quick increase in skills. High achieving students use these for review and reinforcement

  • Jing or screenr : used for “quick and dirty”, informal, perhaps even one time use. Hosted only by the product.
  • Camtasia and Captivate: more enduring, better quality, more options for formats and hosts.

Slidecasts: not much research has been done on this type of learning

  • PowerPoint can be saved as mp4. Can be saved to your own YouTube and Vimeo.
  • Captivate: high quality, several options for saving. This is their favorite platform for video creation. Saving options, format options, multiple choices.

Live Action: tells an authentic story, relevant to the student who can see themselves needing to complete this task

  • Window Live Movie Maker, as an example. Needs an authentic storyline, an actor (does not need to be a librarian, students may be even better), just need a pleasant personality, likeable.

Animation: fun and informal, research shows they may be easier to get across difficult concepts, more visceral and verbal response by the viewer, if you use your own avatar then you won’t need to worry about having s “bad hair day” (per presenters J )

  • Go Animate
  • Powtoons
  • Adobe Flash:big learning curve but you make your own animations.

Interactive Tutorials: research shows these are the best way to reach all learning styles, gives greater control to users who can stop, start, repeat as needed, allows for real time assessments with interactions. Can be combined with screencasts and other types of video.

  • Adobe Flash
  • Captivate
  • Storyline

Here are some of their best tips for creating and working with videos:

Resource based or Content focused?

Choosing to create a video on a particular resource, like Summon, for example, will require editing each time the resource changes – or in the case of Summon, disappears. They go out of date sooner than content based videos. There are times when a resource tutorial is essential. Be sure to save all iterations of the written transcript for each tutorial. This saves time in the event of interfaces changes when new screen shots are the biggest difference.

Concept based tutorials are more difficult to capture but have a longer shelf life. Topics such as “How to create a search question” or “How to develop a list of keywords” are longer lasting and widely applicable.

Length

                No longer than 3 minutes! 2 minutes may be better. Research shows that people generally watch only half of any YouTube video. In the creation of their videos, the presenters admit that it takes from 1 – 3 hours to create 1 minute of good quality video. And they are good at it!

Viewer Retention

At Seminole, they have increased their viewer retention from about 30% of the video when they first started producing online tutorials to over 50% by changing their format to a journalism type structure.

Seminole Image of Tutorial Structure

Thinking of a news article, put the most important item right up front, follow it by the next important, and end with any filler. They got rid of all introductions and started right off with the main point.

Quality Audio

Extremely important for viewer retention. Use a good quality microphone, reduce ambient noise, have a pleasing tone of voice.

Closed Captioning (Accessibility)

                        YouTube has the most features for closed captioning but make sure you edit the texts. Vimeo does not have as much user control. In YouTube, CC can be on or off controlled by the user. Research shows that simultaneous text and sound are too much information for the viewer. Make the CC optional.

There are many more tips and recommendations in this very informative presentation. Please use the links below to view the webcast and to see examples of their videos.

Watch this Blended Librarian Webcast here:

https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2014-09-18.1211.M.3D85CAA9C5C3E5884DE0B675E37E71.vcr&sid=75

Seminole State Library YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7uq_9realinCgGPa5l5_Zg

Digital Frontiers 2014

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[This is an abbreviated post based on the original, which is found here: http://www.annakijas.com/digital-frontiers-2014/]

I have just returned from Digital Frontiers 2014, a conference at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas where I had the pleasure of spending two days with a wonderfully diverse crowd of people representing K-12 education, higher education, academic/public libraries, and museums. I was invited to participate in a panel on Digital Humanities in Music for which I gave a talk on “Open Access and Geo-Spatial Tools in (Music) Research.”  Continue reading →

Cultural heritage and Diversity: Report on what I did at SAA this past August 2014

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This year I didn’t attend the Society of American Archivists (SAA) annual meeting per se, but I attended several meetings and events as part of my official duties as a committee member, as part of what we called the official business side of annual meetings.

I have been a member of SAA for many years (since 1999) and the past 4 years I have been a member of the Cultural Heritage Working Group (CHWG), who charge is:

[to] take the lead in fostering discussion, clarifying issues, and investigating a range of alternative approaches to managing, preserving, and providing access to cultural heritage, given the rights and responsibilities of cultural groups and stakeholders and archivists’ interest in providing equal and open access to all.

In the last 4 years I had the opportunity to be the co-chair of the group (2011-2012) and the online communication point person (2013-2014). This year was my last year as a member so I attended the working group business meeting to finalize tasks given to me last year which included creating an online presence in Facebook and Twitter and to provide a case study based on my experience with the Puerto Rican Civil Court Documents collection that we were able to digitize with the support of CRL-LAMP and the great staff of the digital project team, specifically Michael Bennett. During this year meeting, the new chair, Jennifer O’Neil, focused the discussion on the next steps for the group: gathering case studies that showcase good strategies to better serve cultural heritage collections (e.g. how to balance access to materials with restrictions requested by the creators of these cultural heritage collections); developing best practices and establishing collaboration with other groups such as the education/curriculum committee to further the knowledge of cultural heritage archives issues among the membership.

In addition of attending CHWG meeting, I was invited to speak on a panel sponsored by ARL-SAA Mosaic Scholarship program. This is a new program that got funded thanks to a “$487,652 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program.” There mission is to:

The ARL/Society of American Archivists (SAA) Mosaic Program promotes much-needed diversification of the archives and special collections professional workforce by providing financial support, practical work experience, mentoring, career placement assistance, and leadership development to emerging professionals from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. An important objective of the program is to attract and retain individuals who demonstrate excellent potential for scholastic and personal achievement and who manifest a commitment both to the archives and special collections profession and to advancing diversity concerns within it.

I was asked to share my experience as a minority archivist/librarian in SAA and provide my advice on what to do to get their voices heard and foster change in the organization. This was a great experience since the panel was populated with a cross-section of the most inspiring people who shared their life experience in the organization to these graduate studies pursuing careers in archives, special collections or related fields.

Honduras Archivists

A wonderful lunch with LACCHA members and three presenters from Honduras: Nilda Lizeth López Fernandez (far right), Dilcia Mayela Valle (middle right), and Alexander Flores (far left). In addition, in attendance, Theresa Polk (near left), Marisol Ramos, Beatrice Colastin Skokan (standing-right); Natalie Bauer (taking the picture)

Finally, I attended a lunch sponsored by LACCHA (Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives) roundtable to meet and exchange ideas with several archivists from Honduras that presented later that week at the LACCHA roundtable meeting. This was an event that I helped coordinate but this year the roundtable meeting was changed from Wednesday to Friday so I couldn’t attend their meeting (the first time ever since I helped established this group in 2008). I was grateful for having this great opportunity to meet face to face and exchanged ideas with our colleagues from Honduras and learned the similarities between their work and ours.

Although this year I didn’t stay for the annual conference, as you can read there is a lot of work done even before an annual conference started. Most of the work done by committee, working groups and roundtables happen prior to the opening ceremony and I am happy that this year I was able to attend very productive meetings and events!

IDS Conference (Resource Sharing)

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Joe Natale recently participated in a presentation at the annual IDS Project Conference this year in Syracuse. His presentation covered UCONN’s role in RapidILL’s pilot of the RapidR program, the borrowing and lending of returnable materials among 5 participating BLC libraries.

He also attended sessions that covered upgrade announcements for ILLiad 8.5.x later this year and enhancing ILLiad web pages for users.