Camtasia for Windows seems to have fixed it's ripple delete issues as per a getsatisfaction update from one of the employees. I tested the latest update for the mac (version 2.3.1) and the ripple delete remains elusive.

About 6 months ago, I had tried to raise the issue that ripple delete feature in the Mac version is either mis-labeled or badly programmed, or both. It does not work like ripple delete in standard non-liner editing software found in the industry.

Ripple delete should work like any program worth its salt. Ripple delete is useless if other tracks stay where they are, ruining any B-roll positioned carefully downstream on the timeline. Ripple delete is a sad misnomer in Camtasia for Mac

Quality is conformance to specification. Perhaps you want to ask, if "grade" is important.

e.g. The first iPad mini is a medium grade compared to it's concurrent iPads.

Most cheap devices can be "high quality" i.e. they conform to the specifications they were designed for. Low, medium or high grade specs.

So the question essentially becomes: Should training conform to it's design specifications, the answer is obvious: YES.

If the question is, "should training be high grade" the answer is DEPENDS. Just in time training should be low grade and disposable, but high quality. Grade is designed and decided based on shelf life.

This study report is based on two different surveys, supported by commercial partners mentioned in the ackknowledgements. Which would partly explain the obvious exclusion of Instructional Designers and Educational/Academic Technologists from the fundamental design of the study. The question that emerges is - are the commercial players in the online education space interested in maintaining the gaps in achieving quality online education by keeping Instructional Designers out of the picture? If the Utopia of Online Learning has only Administrators and Faculty, and is devoid of Curriculum Designers, Instructional Designers, Instructional Media Specialists and Academic Technologists, that picture is sadly inaccurate.

Other gaping holes pointed out in the comments, thanks to the statistically inclined readers is the response rate to the survey. Paul K, one of the respondents may be speculating correctly, when blaming the less than 10% response rate on the emotional design of survey questions: "Fear or Excitement" is discussed in a lot of detail.

So why really publish a report of this nature? What is the subliminal message being communicated by the sponsors and the study collaborators? Compared to the clinical trials studies and evidence reports backed by Big Pharma, the report will probably fail to help those who truly work in the trenches of online education. Education managers, designers and developers are significant factors in the emotional perception of delivering an online learning experience.

It is not surprising though. The sponsors of the reports sell enterprise solutions to administrators and the administrators need to get buy in from faculty. The operational aspects of making the technology work falls on faculty in understaffed institutions. Even the top campuses in the nation have scarce recognition of the organizational structure behind a successful online learning effort. So, my fellow instructional designers and technologists, I would like to know your response to this study. Was it inclusive of true performance factors for online courses or is it a subliminal sales pitch for more software and hardware?

Yesterday, we were lighting up.

No, not the cigarette kinda lighting up. We rented a bunch of lights and examined the difference it makes in the quality of video. The camera will open up its aperture way more, if lighting is inadequate and degrade the overall quality of the picture. We have used lighting before, but not in the right quantity and positioning.

Our main concerns, were

1. The obtrusiveness of the light mounts to the local audience
2. The correct strength of lights
3. Correct positioning of lights

Here is a video clip from the event showing the video quality as being close to SD television:

Lights used:
2x1000W from the front
2x300W on the head/shoulders from the back

The other feature was the use of multiple cameras all positioned together to get wide/closeup shots. Thanks to Dan of Russel Video for the tip, who supplied the lights. This reduces staffing needs, with a multicamera setup. We fired up our good old Tricaster for achieving live editing to broadcast over Mediasite.

There are many instances where we need to retrofit video from sources like DVDs or web cams as picture-in-picture for screen captures. Screen captures are done at rounded frame rates like 5, 10, 12, 15, etc. NTSC Videos from traditional cameras, however, are not always recorded at such rounded figures.

One solution is to rip the DVD at 15 frames per second, or some other rounded figure. This way the Camtasia production output will not be thrown out of synchronization when produced for the web. I use Handbrake for converting a DVD capture from rack-mounted DVRs like Grassvalley in the video lab, which performs quite well and gives all the twiddly knobs a geek can desire. It even works with DVD format folders containing VOB files, when one of our partners simply gives us the files only over the network.

Hope this will save you some hours of trial and error. While searching for help on this topic in Techsmith forums at the time of writing this blog post, one can only come across discussions that talk about exporting at 29.97 frames per second from Camtasia, but rarely a discussion about bringing in footage at this frame rate.

It was good to know by VB is not all forgotten. Let me know if you want the widget!

Focus will shift to low cost technologies which are employed by multiple units, but not necessarily cost shared by those units alone. A system similar perhaps to the Public education system, where everyone pays for public schools, but have the freedom to send their children to a private one, if they can afford it.

Leaders need to start thinking of IT as an enabler, rather than a cost. There has been damage to research funding because of the overall perception of funding agencies that IT infrastructure at UM is out-dated. This anecdotal evidence is driving the new shift to this "Rationalization", a component of the NextGen initiative. CoE has already stepped forward to set an example, offering up it's advanced computing resources for the entire campus.

Web-conferencing featured amonst the top shared resources that should be available. I feel that is justified because web-collaboration is (a) cheaper (b) enables inter-departmental or inter-University collaboration - something that funding agencies would appreciate more than localized research. So the future of web conferencing / web collaboration seems bright.

Further, the antiquated university services need to move to the cloud or atleast be competitive with the could. There is encouragement for hosting / storing / processing in the cloud. So the new age of university IT will compete with the likes of Amazon and other providers of cloud computing. Good for us, good for all.

The robot talk wasn't half bad as something AT&T customer support might throw at you, but certainly, I felt a slight urge to throw a digital copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto at her, which I did in the end. Digitally.

How may I assist you today?

how do i log out of my account on the apple store?

I'd be happy to assist you! You would need to either clear out your cookies if you know how to do that or close out of all of your browsers and the Apple store will log itself out within 30 minutes.
huh, so no logout button? I wonder why... would you take a minute to explain the missing button? I am curious to know

Let me check on this for you, just one moment.

thank you

You are welcome!

I'm sorry I don't have the information available as to why there is not a log out button. However you can clear out your cookies or close your browsers and the information will time out within 30 minutes.
thanks anyways....

You are welcome! Did you have anymore questions for me today?

have you read the Cluetrain Manifesto? I do tech support too, I am finding that book eyeopening for techies like us... its written by respectable people (Adobe, NPR). I think it will help. Its available free online. All the best and take care.

The afternoon of World Usability Day (WUD) 2009 [http://usability.msu.edu/conf/2009/Default.aspx] focussed on larger infrastructural, community and sustainability issues. Almost all speakers were excellent, spare one who performed the good old, 'death by powerpoint'. He shall remain unnamed for the rest of this blog post.

Sharron Rush spoke on the need for accessibility. She is a "well decorated veteran" of the IT world and she proved it with an engaging presentation. It was impressive how she illustrated population percentage statistics by making all audiences stand, to begin with (100%). Then having portions sit down and make a statement about the rest. Do another chop, have more people sit down and make a statistical statement. I would love to use this audience engagement tool, if I ever got a large audience like this. (World Youth Congress, Turkey 2010, application submitted, fingers crossed). Sharon runs Knowbility.org.

It's a pity, I did not find a way to follow either Sharon or Knowbility.org via RSS.

Conferences are my favorite use-scenarios for twitter. Even passively following one. By not providing a twitter tag, WUD caused tweeters to use a wide and wild variety of hashtags: #wud09, #wud2009, #wud, #inwud etc… I think we missed out on some great microlearning there. Nevertheless, a good 1-day learning event to go to. Thanks to all MSU folks for hosting the event.

Listening to the UXPod podcast, which interviewed Ethnograpist and UX lab work expert Patrick Larvie, I picked up my first micro-learning lesson.

In Asian countries where it is considered inappropriate to criticize other people's work, users are culturally restrained from openly commenting on the drawbacks of design. This hurdle was overcome by a Mumbai UX company who started putting the users in a story which could come right out of a cheesy Bollywood movie (similar to Telenovelas). Now the user is role-playing and has to use the product/service/system/website under pressure of time etc. And their roleplaying starts generating UX data for the studies.

Anyhoo, onward to WUD09: http://usability.msu.edu/conf/2009/

WCAG 2.0, ARIA and AJAX
The morning session on WCAG was quite enlightening. The talent was playing on home pitch, the presenters being mostly from MSU, but an excellent, enlightened bunch. The first part focussed on the new and improved WCAG 2.0 guidelines released by W3C.

There are three levels of compliance a web interface can meet, A, AA and AAA. A stands for minimal, AA for minimal+recommended and AAA, unbelievably are impossible to meet in the given state of technology, as per Elledge. The thought that occurred to me was how are SEO/SEM types dealing with accessibility? Mostly accessibility works well for SEO, but SEM (Search engine marketing) requires blatant breakage of consistency of design (e.g. landing pages, which have no navigation for most parts. Just big kiosk style design with a huge call to action button.) But maybe I am just being paranoid.

The second part of the morning session was on AJAX, which was quickly moved on from a rather long introduction to AJAX mechanisms (since its not 2005 anymore) to a well rounded presentation on challenges brought to accessibility by the so-called usability of these Rich applications. CAPTCHA emerged as the top culprit amongst all AJAX widgets/elements. In the third part of the morning session, Carl Bussema showed screen-videos of the hell that is unleashed on a JAWS user with AJAX and how they were countering it with special tags and behaviors - i.e. ARIA - Accessible Rich Internet Applications. The handling of accessibility through careful implementation of ARIA was impressive. It is hard work, but these guys impressively make it happen. ARIA is still a working draft, nevertheless, the most crucial happening in coming times. The logic is to expose AJAX elements in the interface to a screenreader in a systematic, logical and non-repititive manner. http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/

Firefox and surprisingly IE do quite well when it comes to ARIA support. Google Chrome comes in last. The best combination for a user with accessibility needs would be Firefox 3.5 + JAWS 10.

The morning presentations were followed by a tour of the Usability Labs, which is well equipped, well supported and well staffed.

Link to the Article

Improving Quality of Simulteaching by Analyzing Demand for Support Abstract: Measuring the quality of synchronous delivery during the 2008 cycle revealed distinct areas for improvement in the synchronous offering approach at two hybrid summer courses. Measurement of the quality of synchronous course delivery was done using demand for support. Analysis of demand data yielded the following areas for improving quality of learning (i) Better instructor & student orientation (ii) better pre-course launch administrative processes and (iii) Simplification of the homework and take-home exam submission process. The effectiveness of the new and improved approach in 2009 is expected to reflect in the new demand data for technical and learning support. This data will be collected during summer 2009 and analyzed in the final paper submission.