Wow, I can't believe how quickly the semester has gone! It seems like only yesterday that it was January and I thought I’d run out of topics to blog about.
My group is starting our work on training materials, and although at this point we are just doing text and screen capture, we’re hoping to at least do a screencast that covers the basics.
I’ve been thinking about screencasting and how effective it is. On one hand, it’s obviously a very effective tool. I’ve watched several of University Library’s screencasts on electronic databases, and I thought they did a great job of explaining the sometimes arcane tactics for searching that the average Joe is not going to intuitively pick up on. They’re fairly easy to do; I’ve spent only a little bit of time with Captivate but I’m sure I could make a passable screencast in very little time.
So what’s the problem? Well, maybe I have too little faith in humanity, but I’m just not sure that the average college student (or even most adults) has the attention span to sit and watch and listen to someone demonstrate a library catalog or electronic database. I feel like they’d rather try to figure it out themselves (and fail), or think “Oh gosh is it really this hard? Nevermind, I’ll try Google”. I’m not sure I really have any answers for this, since I think the problem is a combination of a fatal flaw in society that can’t stop for anything, and library resources that seem designed to maddeningly confound even experience computer users.
This has been my Debbie Downer post.
P.S. Have any of you had any positive feedback from screencasts you’ve done for your library? And what age group were they?
1 comment:
I'll be doing screencasting with my two seminars this summer and will get a better sense of how well received they are. My guess is that they will appeal to some people more than others. I do think it's important to keep them short and focused - better to have a series than one long one.
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