I completely freeze up when I’m asked to read an essay or watch a long talk and respond to it. I don’t really understand it. Part of me just doesn’t want to say something stupid that proves I missed the point. Part of me has too much to say and gets lost in how to decide which is the most important bit.

So I decided to make the graphic above instead.

As a teacher I’ve tried to pull away from what Gardener Campbell referred to as higher education’s “digital facelift”, finding Blackboard / Blackborg / BlackBored oppressive and restrictive. Learning Management System? Whoever invented that term has never seen the way I take notes. And something in me has always rebelled at the thought that anyone other than me could create a system I could use to manage my own learning, much less anyone else’s. Each learner has to learn, their way.

I’m really passionate about media literacy / digital literacy / information literacy – can we just pick a term at some point? I get really bummed when I hear Michael Wesch talking about how most new media is still a one way conversation, despite the immense participatory potential, because our collective skills are so low. I like the idea of moving toward “meta-media fluency” and “digital citizenship.” But I’ve often been dumbfounded at how often people block themselves from moving in this direction because they think they can’t or that it’s too hard.

I guess my graphic above is my takeaway from the whole round of reading and video-watching assigned. Don’t hesitate. Make something and share it. Talk about stuff someone else made. With them. Make something together. Just jump in and pull. Pull like hell.

Classroom-friendly screencasts complete with captions and a full transcript are now an easy reality thanks to YouTube and Google Voice technology.

Every semester I teach three Intro to Computer Graphics classes at my local community college. I teach them back to back on the same day, which means I give the same lecture/software demonstration three times in a row. I have to make checklists to make sure I show each class the same things – it’s very easy to leave something important out and firmly believe I’ve already said it (because I said it to a previous class).

For the last two or three years I’ve been dreaming of offloading this repetitive part of my teaching duties to video. There are many advantages to screencasting these demonstrations:

• Each class will receive exactly the same information
• I won’t leave out anything because the screencasts can be scripted and recorded in advance
• Screencasts can be made available to students’ mobile devices and home computers
• Students can view, pause, rewind as many times as they need, at their own pace
• No one misses something by being embarrassed to ask me to repeat part of the demonstration
• Class and lab time can be freed up for more one-on-one attention from me
• Students become more responsible for their own learning (well, that’s the theory anyway)

But the big drawback has always been this: how to accommodate the hearing-impaired. Online video has been awfully slow to provide for this need. And captioning a DVD is such a tedious process, there’s no way I can do it efficiently, especially given the frequent need to re-record software demonstrations due to operating system and application updates.

(I know what you’re thinking: I’ve forgotten the visually impaired. No, I haven’t. I’ve had ability to provide HD screencasts, and zoom in to more clearly show a small part of the screen, for a couple of years now. That takes care of most visual issues, certainly all the ones I’ve encountered. I freely admit it won’t accommodate a blind student, but so far I have never had a blind student enroll in a graphic design / visual communications course. It may happen at some point, but then I will have the help of my campus Disability Resources office.)

Finally, this is my year. Google and YouTube have made captioning screencasts ridiculously easy. Provided you prep a script before you record, you can turn your script into captions and a transcript in one simple step.

Example screencast script (click to enlarge)

I always type out a simple two-column script for my screencasts, with what I want to say on the left, and what I want to see on the right. This works for me. Do it your own way. I don’t really worry about sticking exactly to the script. But it helps to have everything I want to do planned out, and I can refer to my script quickly if I forget what I need to do next. Use of a script cuts the number of times I use filler sounds like “um” by 99-100%.

In case you want to know the rest of my workflow:

With script in hand, I record the audio and video portion of my screencast simultaneously using iShowU HD. I have a decent USB mic, so I don’t generally have to worry about my audio quality.

Goofy but effective tip: make a title graphic and display it on screen while you introduce the purpose of the screencast. Then there is no need to edit in a title after you record. You can do the same with a credits graphic for the end of your video.

If I need to edit the video, my first choice is QuickTime Pro. I can mark in/out points around mistakes or long pauses and just cut them out. From QuickTime Pro I can just re-save as a stand-alone .mov and upload that to YouTube (I do export podcast versions as well). If I want to zoom in on a particular part of the screen or add overlay graphics I move to Final Cut Pro, where the workflow gets a tad more complex. Lately I just avoid that for efficiency’s sake, mainly because the HD version of the video allows viewers to easily see what I’m doing on screen. But if I really want the video to be clear on a smaller device, like an iPhone, editing in some zooms is the way to go. Since we have broadband Internet access on campus, I’m not sweating this too much, but I will rethink it if feedback from my students indicates I should.

But, the captions.

Here is how to do the captions: Save the voice-only part of your script as a plain text file. Edit your uploaded video on YouTube by going to the Captions and Subtitles tab. Browse for that text file, mark it as a Transcript, and upload it.

What happens? Google Voice technology reads your transcript while listening to your video, and automagically generates a caption file timed for your video. You can then download and tweak that file if you need to. But I find if I stick pretty close to my script, editing the generated captions just isn’t necessary. See for yourself in this example (click the up arrow in the lower right corner, then click CC to turn the captions on):

Or just check it out on YouTube, where you can also activate an interactive transcript.

For a more thorough how-to, scroll to the Captions by Voice Recognition section of this Mashable tutorial.

The biggest thing people were surprised about was that I recorded the audio live (instead of using pre-recorded audio from a CD), and that I did it in only three takes. Actually I should clarify – I did three stationary takes for the audio, then three more to get the shots where the camera is moving around the singers (and those were without audio). The natural next question from a lot of people was “what mic did you use,” or “what was your audio set-up?” So here follows a list of the equipment I used and a description of the recording set-up. (Please note, if the product link is to a seller rather than the manufacturer, it’s not because I necessarily recommend that seller. Some manufacturer sites make you select a language before entering the site, and that messes up direct linking to their product sheets.) I’ll start the list with the mic and work my way back to the camera.

• Microphone: audio-technica AT831b omnidirectional lavalier mic, wind-screen ON
• 60ft XLR cable
• XLR to mini adapter: BeachTek DXA-4 dual XLR adapter (warning, link contains flash with audio)
• Camera: Panasonic PV-GS65 3-chip mini-DV camcorder
• Cheap .5x wide angle lens attached to the camera
• good stationary tripod or poor man’s steadicam or handheld for the shots
• and of course headphones from the camera to my ears to make sure I was getting something

And the arrangement for the 3 audio takes were with the camera stationary on the tripod, and the mic run up the branches of the mesquite tree and taped there with black gaffer’s tape to hide the wire from the camera. The mic was approximately centered between the two musicians and three feet above the singer’s head.

The audio you hear of a bird was just one that happened to be nearby during recording, and it chose that moment to jam with the band. The audio of the guns going off was from the camera mic on a handheld shot. We got permission from those guys to shoot video of them. They were actually out there doing it right – practicing gun safety and cleaning up after themselves. But we weren’t finding any gangstas or marine wannabes that day, and we needed something!

If you have more questions regarding the setup or any of the shoot, ask in a comment and I will answer there. Subscribe-To-Comments is now on by default, so deactivate it if you don’t want to hear back via email.

And here’s a nice little graphic illustrating the videoblogging workflow I teach my students. You can grab a larger version over at Flickr, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

I’m posting everything here because the NMC conference is a for-pay walled garden that’s only available for 60 days. While this information will probably be out of date in a year or less, I’d still like it archived and available for reference to anyone interested in vlogging.

Since it rained today, I could not photograph the tree removal, so I decided to post this critter instead. Maybe it will help someone considering buying a voice recorder if they can see how it works. On the whole, I recommend this gadget! I used it to record long meeting for podcast on my neighborhood website, and it worked like a dream.

If you want one, they can be had for cheap over at Amazon, and if you buy one by clicking my Amazon link I will put any earnings back into Node101 Phoenix. It’s always great to buy direct from the maker, too, which you can do at XtremeMac’s MicroMemo page.

Almost every mayonnaise on the market is encased in plastic, and I’m sick of it. My husband is the type of person who keeps a spare of everything. We always have one jar of mayo in the fridge, and one in the pantry. Over the last year we have watched our choices of brand diminish as more and more of them switch to plastic jars.

We bought some mayonnaise in a plastic jar exactly once, when we had no other choice in the grocery store. By the time it went from our pantry to the fridge, three weeks tops, it had gone bad. It smelled, well, wrong, and we dared not eat it. Now, the only place I can get mayonnaise in glass jars is the local organic or health foods stores, where it is approximately twice the cost of regular grocery stores, at least here in my neighborhood.

Glass is better for two huge reasons. First, it isn’t permeable like plastic, and your mayo won’t go bad, at least not in the next several years. Second, you can reuse the glass jar for a long time, and then you can readily recycle it. (Phoenix only recycles #1 and #2 plastics, and not all plastic food containers are accepted.)

So one of my resolutions this year is to drop out of the mayo market. I am no longer a mayonnaise consumer. I am a mayonnaise creator.

Oh, and in keeping with another new year’s resolution, this video is compressed using the h.264 codec using the multi-pass setting, as per Freevlog‘s latest screencast. It’s still iPod compatible, and I can do it from my MacBook Pro.

Happy New Year, everyone!

This excerpt features one of the great staples of home movies, a white Christmas with a toddler delighting in new presents, some amazing tobogganing, and a captivating moment of self-discovery in a mirror that would make Jacques Lacan proud.

I sent my email in to see about getting my first student film, a music video for D-Squared, transferred to digital so I can re-edit it and add the music. If that happens you will see it here in short order, though the silent footage will become part of the collective creative consciousness via Creative Commons licensing. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, if you have any 8mm or Super8mm footage sitting around gathering dust, you owe it to yourself to check out Lost in Light. They will transfer your film to DV tape or DVD for free, provided you grant them non-exclusive, non-commercial rights to show your work on their site. All you pay for is the Mini-DV tape or DVD and the shipping cost. There is nowhere you can get a deal like that, and think of the cools stuff you can rescue before it deteriorates beyond recognition. I cannot wait for more of this found footage to become available.

Luckily, the press release generated some interest and was picked up by the Arizona Business Gazette. I was interviewed by reporter Alison Stanton on December 4, and her article was published yesterday. She was nice enough to email me and let me know.

I’m looking forward to Tuesday, January 2, when I can go see whether the article had any immediate effect on enrollment.

The class is based on Jen Simmons‘ course – many thanks to Jen for permission to adapt her syllabus. And thanks to Dale Doubleday, Art Department Chair at Phoenix College, for her support and forward thinking ways.

The web site says it accepts input from other devices. That’s something I’m looking forward to. Might be a quick way to convert lousy video into audio-only on the fly without capturing the video to a computer. I have to agree with Philip Hodgetts:

If it’s not necessary to watch the video portion to get the value from a program, then dump the video and just go with audio.

I’m pre-ordering now. When I get it, I’ll test it out and post a review.