January 2006 Archives

I've written in a previous entry that I am a fan of using Camtasia Studio to make instructional movies. I've made them to support activities and exercises for students in my virtual course and for things like podcasting and making Live Bookmarks.

Another use is for "just-in-time" training. Students in my course made a test podast last week and the RSS feed-XML file that accompanies it. It was very hard for students who have no experience using a mark-up language. Half of the class has a podcast due this afternoon and if three of the first four are any indication, they continue to find it confusing. So I wrote up a two-page, double-spaced script, prepared a couple windows, and then made a new Camtasia project that produces a movie of the steps with me talking through it. I also like how I can set up a table of contents -- in Camtasia Studio this is called adding markers -- so students can watch the movie and quickly go to back or forward to particular sections.

I think this type of just-in-time instruction has great application in teaching both blended and distance courses. It took me about an hour to produce the Flash and QT video.

We are now able to podcast the 2005 Speakers Series as MP4 video that can sync to a video iPod. And, it looks great on the iPod. If you don't have a video iPod, it plays nicely in your iTunes. Load times seem to vary from fast to slow, depending on your connection and desktop/laptop computer.

Subscribe to the podcast at http://podcasting.arizona.edu/speakersseries.xml

I picked up a NY Times while travelling home in late December and saved the business section because there were a couple interesting articles about devices. Everywhere you look at the end of the year are your typical "year in review" pieces and the typical "what to look for in 2006" pieces. David Pogue, whose articles in the Times are, IMO, among the best wrote an article entitled: 10 Greatest Gadget Ideas of the Year. (You can probably still get this free on the Times website.) I liked how Pogue framed the piece:

But some of the year's greatest joys weren't new products, but aspects of new products. Here and there, you could find tiny touches of brilliance: clever steps forward and new spins on old features that somehow made it through committee, past the bean counters and under the radar of marketing departments.

His ten are:

1. SanDisk's folding memory card
2. Palm's VCR-style buttons for voice mail
3. HPfront side TV connector
4. Canon PowerShot S80 video capture at resolutions higher than 1024 X 768
5. Apple's convincing ABC to be the first to offer inexpensively priced TV shows for download to the iPod
6. LG's VX8100 flip open cell phone with buttons on the outside
7. MS' Office Live solution for small businesses that includes a domain name for free
8. Audiovox's Shuttle DVD player that hangs on driver's side headrest to entertain passengers (kids) in the backseat
9. Casio digital camera that that shoots three consecutive images to increase your chances of getting the perfect family portrait (you know, the one where no one in the picture has blinked or turned her/his head
10. JVC and Sony's HDTV camcorders that record on inexpensive MiniDV tapes (his point is that JVC and Sony could have introduced some pricey proprietary tapes but didn't)

If you have a favorite end-of-year article highlighting last year's successes and/or predictions for the coming year, put it in a comment to this entry.