LIBR 246-13 Building the Social Library Online

Wow, that was quite the experience.  I think that might possibly be one of the more frustrating things I’ve tried to do for this class.  The troubles started with the fact that I have a Mac.  I went on the Jing website and was very pleased by the feel of the site as well as the information about the program.  I downloaded Jing (which took quite a while). When it finally finished, it didn’t install.  I went and found it in my computer and double-clicked on the auto-install.  Nothing happened. I noticed that an icon for the program was there.  I double-clicked that. Again, nothing happened. So I went back to the Jing website and began the install again.  While I was there, I began to poke around a bit.  Soon the problem was clear…Jing only supports Mac OS X 10.4.9 and above.  I’m still running 10.3.9. Grrrr.

 

So I had to wait until my husband was around the next evening, and begged for the use of his work laptop (which he’s not really supposed to download programs onto).  Once I started on that, a PC, I decided to try Camtasia.  At the very end of a long download, the computer shut it down, saying that it had no security certificate.  Grrrr. I tried again, and the third (fourth?) time was a charm.  After all that, though, I was starting pretty late. And Camtasia, while pretty intuitive and clearly powerful, is not a simple program. The screencast eventually worked out, though not at all to the standard that I’d hoped.  The microphone on my husband’s computer is not great (for a while we weren’t even sure it existed!) The URL to my screencast is http://www.screencast.com/users/lisyrose/folders/Default/media/ef7854a2-106f-45e2-aab9-6fb4be88c033

 

This whole experience certainly made me realize one thing…I need a new computer!  Well, I probably learned a few other things as well. For one thing, screencasting is not as easy as it looks, and a microphone that is not built in to the computer is necessary—typing and movement is far too loud in the built-in ones.  It’s also clear that screencasting software is still relatively young…there aren’t many open-source versions, and very few work on Macs.  I’ll be interested to see this field grow in the future, perhaps making it more accessible to the general public.