Watch Me: Help Wanted
[reposted from the Software Carpentry blog]
Back in 2007, Jon Udell observed that screencasts facilitate accidental knowledge transfer in a way that more traditional media don’t. As I said yesterday, we’d therefore like to start recording short screencasts of programmers thinking aloud as they solve small problems using their preferred tools. The aim is to show learners how to program—what order to write things in, how to debug, when and how much to test, and so on. Everything will be covered by the same Creative Commons license as our other material, and made freely available for remixing and other use.
If you’d like to help, please:
- Volunteer to be recorded by mailing us. We’ll help you install a screen recorder (if you don’t have one already—you might be surprised to find that you do), give you a small problem, and edit the video you produce so that you don’t have to.
- Volunteer to edit video for us, so that we can put our energy into organizing people
. - Volunteer to work the floor at PyCon in March. We can’t attend (workshops to run, etc.), but it would be great if we could get a dozen or more “here’s how I do it” recordings done during the conference.
Remember, as an open source project, Software Carpentry depends on your help to survive and thrive. If you have wanted to help, but have worried that creating and recording lectures would be too much work, this is a way for you to help that will take half an hour or less. We look forward to hearing from you.
It occurred to me that you could use SVG versions of “screenshots” and combine SMIL animation with audio synched to emulate a screencast in a much smaller file than video.
BTW, see my link for another example of slideshow inside SVG.
@Mardeg
That’s an interesting suggestion, and I think I understand most of what you’re proposing. However, since you left a fake email address, I don’t have a way to get in touch with you to follow up…