Explaining emergent technologies (with PowerPoint) March 30, 2009
Posted by Steve Boneham in : HowTo, projects, design, presentation , add a comment
I’m working on a JISC project to produce guides to how emergent technologies like social media, RSS and wikis can enhance the practice of staff in research, teaching and administration. One output of this will be a series of icon-based videos explaining the key concepts of these technologies. Unable to find suitable icons in stock image sites, I started to make my own - with PowerPoint. This post is an attempt to justify that and retain some credibility!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming these icons (see sample above) are better than those you’ll find in stock image sites. Those sites are full of professional quality vector icons with stunning use of lighting, shadows and 3D. But that’s the problem. The more striking the design, the worse they look when you mix icons from different sets. You also need a relatively high level of graphic design skills to manipulate them.
In contrast, while PowerPoint is clearly not a graphics app, it has some decent built-in effects that can make even simple geometric shapes look respectable with just a few clicks. Also, for screencasts that are essentially narrated presentations, it made sense to work with them in a presentation tool, then convert to a web video format for delivery.
As PowerPoint is a tool that most people (in our target audience) are familar with, we hope that others might start to make their own resources with them so are looking to release the PowerPoints under a creative commons (non-commercial) licence.
If you’d be interested in using them, please add a comment to let us know.
For Pod’s Sake: making better podcasts December 2, 2008
Posted by Steve Boneham in : podcasting, HowTo, projects, social media , 1 comment so farI recently developed a podcasting workshop for Netskills that’s turned out to be one of our most popular events and certainly my favourite to run (thanks for the funding Lawrie!). So, based on what I learnt from putting this workshop together, here are a few tips for anyone thinking of producing a podcast.
Understand the medium: When done well, podcasting is engaging, entertaining and educational. However, podcast directories are full of podcasts that only a mother could love. So, how do you keep it interesting?
- Plan before you produce: Your mind will be elsewhere when recording, so have an outline to keep you on track. Some people script, but if you do, be careful not to sound scripted. You can’t script interviews, but you can still plan for them.
Respect your audience: It takes time to make a good podcast, but it takes time to listen to one too. Audio is listened to in real time, so let people know what’s coming and why it’s worth hanging around. Your listeners may be mobile, distracted and time-shifting, so don’t ask too much of them.- Be conversational: Don’t think of it as broadcasting to the masses, but more like having a chat with a friend. That forces you to be less formal and more personal, which works well in this medium
- Add detail: Your words help listeners create images in their minds, so give them enough detail to make that image interesting as well as accurate.
Get the right equipment: You don’t need to a sound engineer to produce a professional sounding podcast, but knowing a bit about the hardware will help you get a good, clean signal that your listeners will thank you for:
- A decent mic: Forget the one that came with your PC. For under £100 you can get one that will make you sound like a pro. We use a Samson C03-U condenser mic with USB output - plug this into a laptop and you have a portable studio.
- Another decent mic: Condenser mics are no good for field work as they’re too sensitive to handling noise. Instead, get a
decent dynamic mic such as a Shure SM58. We also use an Edirol R09-HR recorder, which is lightweight enough to carry around, but gives surprisingly good results. - Mixer: you might not need one at first, but as your show grows you’ll find their multiple high quality (XLR) inputs and control over each channel essential.
- Headphones: Our brains tune out background noise, but mics don’t, so use a good set of headphones to monitor your signal.
Present like a Pro: The best equipment won’t help you if you can’t use it to communicate effectively.
- Get in the zone: Find the positioning that gives the best sound for your mic. Too far away, and you’ll sound tinny; too close and you risk popping the mic and picking up some unpleasant mouth sounds. As a rule, place the mic about a hands width from your mouth and slightly off to one side.
- Be natural: Talking into a mic can seem strange at first, but the more you do it the easier it gets. A common mistake is to talk too quickly, so be aware of your pace. Watch the ‘erm…’ count, but don’t let it put you off - you can edit them out later.
- Adopt an on air persona: This might mean being a bit more OTT than you are in real life, but a little over-emphasis in the right places is very effective.
- Listen to you: This might come as a shock, but yes, you really do sound like that! Once you come to terms with this, you’ll find it’s easier to be natural and to make the most of your voice.
That’s a wrap: But the work doesn’t stop at recording. The post-take edit is where you can tweak your content with tools like Audacity to make it really sparkle.
Cut paste: Audio software makes it easy to cut, copy, paste & resequence your audio as well as add extra tracks- Signal processing: Equalisation, compression and normalisation can really give your audio warmth and presence. But use each in moderation.
Get it out there: Of course, the final step - publishing your polished podcast - is the most important, but is usually the most simple. It certainly is if you use a free podcast hosting service like Podomatic, to which you just upload your content via a set of forms and through the magic of RSS, your podcast will find its way to your listeners. There are of course lots of ways to host podcasts, but that’s another post.
If you want to know more about podasting, check out the links below, get in touch or come on one of our workshops!
- My podcasting bookmarks on delicious
- Netskills podcasting workshop
- Podcasts by workshop participants
I’m aware that it’s a little ironic to blog about podcasting, so I will eat my own dogfood and do a podcast version of this post soon.
(photo credits: All images downloaded from stock.xchng)
Put that in your Yahoo pipe and smoke it! November 26, 2008
Posted by Steve Boneham in : HowTo, projects, RSS, JISC , 1 comment so far
I’m no web programmer (I don’t even have a beard), but I do appreciate the clever things they do that with a little hacking can make me look clever too! From JavaScript libraries to netvibes widgets and open-source Flash video players, you can go a long way without really programming. But when recently I needed to aggregate some RSS feeds, then filter, truncate and modify them, I thought I was in for some long nights of coding. That’s until I found out how easy this stuff is with Yahoo Pipes.
Pipes lets you mashup and manipulate web content through a simple graphical interface. So rather than writing lines of code, you simply drag & drop blocks from a code library and change a few parameters [see image above or view the pipe].
Pipes has been around a while, but the first time I found a need to use it in anger was for the JISC-IRET support project I’m working on. We needed a way to syndicate content from each of the project blogs to a portal we were building on Netvibes. It’s easy to add each blog feed individually, but we felt that a ‘latest from the projects’ block would be good for the homepage and blog sidebars.
To create this, what we needed to do was:
- Combine feeds from six blogs in various flavours of RSS/Atom
- Truncate feeds so there was only one post from each blog
- Modify post titles to include the name of the blog it came from
- Sort posts in descending date order
It was surprisingly easy to apply this logic in Pipes. Most of the blocks are self-explanatory. For example, ‘FetchFeed’ fetches a feed, ‘Truncate feed after’ truncates after a set number of posts - you get the idea. The only complicated block was Regex, which takes the title of a post as a string and appends the name of the blog to it.
Once you’ve designed your pipe, publishing it creates a public web page with an RSS feed which you can then syndicate elsewhere - such as to the JISC-IRET blog and JISC-IRET portal.
I’m sure some of my more bearded friends will view this crude attempt at web programming with disdain, but perhaps what they should be moer worried about is that services such as Yahoo Pipes might just turn some ordinary web users into wanabee programmers who can do things for themselves.
Presenting student videos in iTunes coverflow November 18, 2008
Posted by Steve Boneham in : HowTo, projects, video , 11comments
A key aim of our virtual open day project was to present video profiles of students in an engaging and informal way. I’d seen a couple of sites using an iTunes-esque coverflow to do this, but assumed this would need some pretty intense Flash coding. Turns out that it does, but luckily someone else has already done it and shared it with the world, so all you need is a text editor and about 5 minutes.
First, a little background. The virtual open day project aims to exploit web technologies to recreate the experience of an on-campus open day to support recruitment in Politics. One of the most important things prospective students do on a real open day is to talk to current students to find out what it’s really like to study here. So that’s what we needed to capture on video.
It was a pleasant surprise how keen students were be recorded (even taking into account a small financial inducement) and how media savvy they were. Being in front of a camera didn’t faze them in the slightest - more than can be said for some of the staff!
Once we’d captured and edited the videos, I wanted to find an engaging way to present them. This is marketing after all. In terms of user experience, there’s really only one choice of target player these days - the Adobe Flash player. This is almost ubiquitous, can be embedded directly in web pages and is quick to load and playback media. So, I published the videos as FLVs in Camtasia Studio and then looked for a way to deliver them.
Inspiration came via an article in Dot.net magazine on recreating the coverflow effect used in iTunes. This article led me (by way of Google) to an alternative open source coverflow template freely distributed under an MIT licence. This is an Adobe Flash application that reads data from an XML file and displays it in the coverflow format.
It’s very simple to get this working in its ‘vanilla’ state and not too much more effort to tinker with it to tailor the appearance and functionality to your site - like this…
View the open day videos in coverflow
For users who don’t like the coverflow, or can’t use it, we also offer access to the videos through a page of static image. For me, this just shows that there’s no comparison when it comes to which approach is more engaging and visually attractive. So, if you’re looking for a different way to deliver content, I’d recommend giving this a try and let me know how you get on.
Full Posts
Twitter
Delicious
Slideshare
JISC Netskills
LinkedIn