Lex Ferenda

Further to my February discussion on putting presentations online, Darius tells me (off-blog) about this presentation by Stephen Deane at UCC. It enjoys the delightfully self-referential status of being an online presentation about online presentations. (I haven’t seen something so perfect, in conceptual terms, since I spent the summer in a library about libraries). In February, I commented that UCC planned some work with Camtasia - this is one thing that has come out of that work.

In my own world, I successfully put together an ‘enhanced podcast’ with similar effect. ProfCast was the software here - on the recommendation of Dr. Mike Brady (who has put an entire lecture course online in this format). Basically, the small Mac app captures the audio, and marks the audio with still images from the Keynote presentation that’s running at the same time. The output I used was enhanced podcast, but there are other options available. This audio file (and with appropriate XMLing, podcast) can be listened to in iTunes, a video iPod or similar, with the image ‘changing’ at the right moments (transitions aren’t kept, but point-by-point animations are spun out into separate stills)….it sounds complex but it’s very simple and easy to follow, from the user perspective.