TLP Blog

Patrick Crispin has created an evaluation rubric to pit these two worthy competitors against each other, specifically Adobe Captivate 3 vs. Techsmith Camtasia 5 (newer than what we’re using in TLP). His matrix weights ease of editing very highly (appropriately, I think) but gives nearly equal weight to ease of recording and captioning.

In his live demo of Captivate, I’m seeing some very nice features – simulation mode, snap application window size to a recording window (instead of having to to it the other way around). There’s a MS Vista bug that’s very annoying. Doesn’t record mouse movement, records a path and simulates the motion on playback: excellent compression – this really isn’t a movie recording. Wow – easy to time-compress segments in editing, alter mouse paths, and more with Adobe’s very sleek multi-track interface; of course, they make Premier!
Camtasia 5 also has some improvements in the recording interface with app window resizing. Camtasia is creating a true movie, of course, and scores much higher for Patrick on the recording, even though you can’t create interactive simulation.
On the production side, camtasia now has presets for iPod video and blog posts, where the cool pan-and-zoom functionality is very preferred to shrinking the end product.
They score pretty much equally on editing. As for output, Captivate cretaes an attractive flash product (4 files), as you might expect. Camtasia, however, has the very flexible output module we know and love, with the ability to link an mp3 and iPod file as bonus downloads with your video version! We should really take advantage of this more often.
Camtasia has a much better captioning system, and despite some keyboard access issues with their flash interface, they are a pretty clear winner in this competition.

Polling question: What technology-related tools/trends are currently “hot” on your campus?
Answers: 30% web 2.0 (blogs, wiki, social networks), 27% clickers, 10% grassroots video, 10% podcasting. We voted 3 times to assess the top 3 per campus but I think the first result is the most interesting.
Question: What technology would you like to see on your campus? Big spike (30%) for podcasting! Clearly there’s a lot of interest in capturing and sharing media to extend learning opportunities.
30% of the audience would like to receive training in emerging technologies – for me, I feel very lucky to be able to do a lot of self-directed exploration of these technologies, which means I should be one of the people training that 30%!

At the end of the session, the exec council asked for feedback about the town hall. Reflecting on the fact that less than half the conference attendees showed up, and the fact that I practically missed breakfast to make the 8am meeting, I suggested to my favorite council member that having the town hall be the conference breakfast for day 2 would be a good idea – food is one of the most primal motivators of even the most evolved humanoids.

Kevin Kelly from SFSU is guiding us in the use of the CATS Knowledge Base, a new wiki hosted by the Center for Distributed Learning where the collected wisdom of CATS and the CATS email lists can be collected. I’d contributed an early article to the ‘base about JAWS accessibility of our LMS for students, and since then only a few articles have been started. Today we’re brainstorming new articles and starting stubs – hands-on, in a computer lab.

It’s a much simpler system than our enterprise wiki, but that’s to our advantage here as the hope busy technologists from across the spectrum of job titles will quickly capture and share those little methods, ideas and FAQs that come up on every campus in similar ways.

Questions for the next implementation phase:

• Under what license can/should material be shared and released?
• Is it ethical to repost information from a source as opposed to linking to it?
• Currently the Knowledge Base user accounts are restricted to anyone with a .edu account – but is that too broad?
• At what point should the community develop editors or wiki-gardeners who check the veracity and quality of articles authoritatively?

Lots of heady content in this discussion bringing together representatives of ITAC and DAT communities as well as CATS leadership and… um… others. Kathy (our director) singled out our wiki adoption as a technology project that has the promise of a positive transformation for her team. The general consensus about what qualities make an employee likely to be successful and promoted within the organization is communication skills, including people skills. Does live blogging count? Nevermind I’m paying attention to the jeezusphone and not looking attentive to the members of the panel on the daïs.