I really like Jing. Sure, you could dish out hundreds of dollars for Captivate or Camtasia and get a bit more robust set of features (including the ability to create videos over 5 minutes and post production editing), but in terms of value, it’s hard to beat this free, simple and easy to use piece of software for creating videos of screen captures.

One feature I would like to see in Jing that it currently doesn’t have is the ability annotate content on the screen as I create screenshot videos. Well, this week I came across a free tool called ZoomIt from the Sysinternals group at Microsoft. Here is another handy, free tool that allows you to do simple annotations on the screen, and also allows you to zoom in. Put Jing and ZoomIt together and you’ve got a handy screen video capture that allows you to annotate videos. Here’s a quick example of what you can do with Jing and ZoomIt.

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Well, hopefully my last minute editorial decision to have Stephen Downes memorable quote about Brian Lamb’s presentation style read by a screen reader doesn’t get me off Stephen’s Christmas card list before I ever had the chance to get on. But it’s quite humbling to see your work noticed by folks like Stephen and Alan Levine who, along with other folks, have had really nice things to say about the Brian Lamb intro mashup I put together to introduce Brian’s keynote at Walls Optional, our annual in house Distributed Education conference. Thanks for all your comments. It was such a hoot to put together, and gave me a great excuse to dive into the collected/ive works of Brian Lamb.

I’ll have a proper post mortum about the event in a few days once I collect my thoughts, but suffice to say that the words coming back to us about Brian’s presentation have been words like “inspiring”, “eye opening”, “thought provoking” and “excellent”. It was all we could have hoped for and more in a keynote.

So, if you haven’t seen it, here is the intro that never was because, as fate would have it, technology intervened and it borked in front of the live studio audience. As Scott noted, it’s time to replace the 286’s on our rolling rack.

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Just a couple days left before Walls Optional hits Camosun on Tuesday and I am trying to put a few finishing touches on my parts of the conference.

I’ve set up a video feed page on our site where we are going to try to capture the video live from CC124, which is where Brian Lamb will be delivering his keynote Tuesday morning.

Following Brian we’ve got Scott Leslie talking about the 2008 Horizon Report, Dominic Bergeron presenting on Student Created Content and Paul Stacey talking about Dare2bDigital. So, we should be giving our new Flash server a bit of a workout.

In addition, we’re going to try to capture some of the other events via webcams and portable MP3 players, so even if we can’t stream all the presentations live, we’re still hoping to create a decent resource site for after the conference.

Right now I’ve got 2 priorities left before Tuesday. Get my workshop on Netvibes put together and get over this cold. Isn’t that always the case - right before a big event is when the body is most likely to go “whoa, cool your jets buddy!”

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Another gem from Common Craft and their excellent “In Plain English” series, this time about podcasting.

The trouble I tend to experience with faculty, especially faculty who are fairly new users of technology, is explaining the key difference between a podcast and traditional streaming audio, which is subscription. I often find that until people actually see a podcatcher in action, they sometimes can’t wrap their head around what that subscription model looks like, especially if they have never been exposed to RSS feeds before. This video will help.

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I was about to add my name to Alan Levine’s Twitter Life Cycle when I realized I have been using Twitter for 3 months now. Has it really been 3 months since I hopped on board the Twitter train? Wow. Time flies when you are having fun. And Twitter is fun.

But beyond fun, in the past 3 months Twitter has quickly become an indispensable tool for me. It is allowing me to connect with people at a completely different level. Clive Thompson at Wired puts it well when he says Twitter creates a social sixth sense.

It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

I experienced one of those “feats of coordination” a few days after I signed up for Twitter. Northern Voice was happening in Vancouver. I was unable to attend, but was able to virtually attend as my network kept feeding me information via Twitter. Links to supplemental materials and live videocasts of keynotes were popping up, allowing me watch and listening real time. I followed the backchannel conversations and was able to get a sense of what was happening, from multiple independent sources. People who did not know each other, but happened to be at the same conference in the same room all commenting on the same points. It was incredibly rich - an aha moment for me that convinced me there was something to this Twitter thing.

Since then my delicious account has been filling with Twitter specific content - how academics are using it, both professionally and pedagogically. Tools and mashups to leverage it, and guides and resources I can use to help me convince others to join in.

So, after 3 months with Twitter I can say that there is something there, despite the frequent outages. If you want to find me I’ll be at twitter.com/clintlalonde.

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