Friday, April 4, 2008

Celia’s Twelfth Blog for Library Systems Class—Francis Ford Coppola is SAFE.

I have found going through the wiki process that things I thought would be easy really aren't. I could never get my computer to print screen or to get it to copy parts of pages which I have been able to do with other computers but for some reason not my laptop. Since I wanted to show different page parts and this wouldn't work I used my flip camera and took pictures of the page I wanted to show. This wasn't a perfect solution but at least I was able to give the user of the wiki an idea of what they should be looking at. I took on the project of writing my group's help page of the wiki so showing examples was useful and in some cases I believe necessary.

At out last wiki group meeting I took a video of Megan using the wiki as part of the training for the wiki. I thought this would be easy to add to the wiki. I was wrong again. First I had to edit the tape as at one point Megan stopped and started again. So I had to make two videos out of it, the first video ending where she started the part she repeated and the second starting where she restarted that part. It amazingly came together quite well. I then proceeded with downloading the video to YouTube. There is a feature in the flip camera software that allows for this fairly easily. At first, I kept getting an error message that it wouldn't transfer. I finally got one to transfer but when I checked it, it didn't work constantly. I ended up taking my laptop to the library and having one the patrons who knows more about YouTube help me. He figured out that the inconsistency was caused by there being to videos downloaded. He figured out that the bad one had to be eliminated for it to work correctly. So he eliminated what he thought was the bad one but it ended up he deleted the good one. I would then have to start over with downloading the videos to YouTube. The filtering in my library prevented me from doing it at the library so I went home and again downloaded the video to YouTube after first deleting the bad one that was still there. They download seemed to go well but I couldn't get the video to play from the wiki. I thus went back to the wiki and eliminated the link that was there and made a new one to the new working video. Now at last I think the video is working and working consistently.

After we made the training video more pages were added to the wiki. I am worried that this might cause some confusion but do not want to redo the video. The video still highlights the main points of the wiki. I was surprised when today I got an email from a library praising the video as one of the best they had seen explaining a wiki. I hope that everyone else feels that too!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Celia-

I can understand completely your frustration with the YouTube technology. The first time I tried to upload a video to YouTube was for work and we tried repeatedly (on my day off) to get it to work. It took hours for it to load the content which was a 42 second long video and then loaded wrong twice. I had to reload it so many times I just gave up. I came back to it the next day to find that after leaving it all night it actually worked...and this was on our very fast network connection. I have since kind of avoided YouTube.

Good luck on finishing up your wiki and it was great to have another class with you this semester!

Amanda

Mary Alice Ball said...

Video editing can be so time consuming. Since I started podcasting my appreciation for film editors has soared. I never imagined it would take such patience. Good for you for persisting.