Shoulder-to-Shoulder Instructional Media: My Tagging Screencast at NTEN!

Photo from my flickr stream
View the Tagging Screencast
Presented by NTEN

I'm pleased to announce that my screencast about tagging has been released and showcased by NTEN!  I created this screencast back in September/October of last year, so this release has provided a great opportunity to meta reflect on the whole screencast creation process as well as consider how my views about the use of tagging have evolved.

I've thought long and hard about how video editing amplifies my compulsive nature and how I need to  reduce my ratio of video minutes viewed per hours of editing time!  I hope to share some simple and fun ways to create "shoulder-to-shoulder" instructional media for the panel on Screencasting at NTC I'm doing.

While I'm still very much passionate about screencasting, I've come to dislike the term.  I personally want to move away from the metaphor of making movies of the computer screen to more shoulder-to-shoulder instructional media and perhaps something that is more participatory or for lack of a better word, social.  Maybe it is more like moment capture.  How do you create good instructional media in a reasonable amount of time and do a good enough job that helps people learn something by viewing it?      

That's enough meta for now.

If you're still with me, let me share some tidbits about that photo.   I created it for the screencast to illustrate the definition of tagging.  What is really interesting to me is that the photo - which I composed and uploaded into flickr is my most commented, favorited, and viewed photo!  (It was even favorited by this guy I don't know named Joshua)  I've also had many requests from folks to use in their tagging presentations.  Again, shows me the power of open content and open source thinking.

Here's the script from the screencast written back in October.  Some of my thinking has definitely evolved ....

Introduction

These program notes will help you implement some of the ideas presented in the screencast. If you have questions about tagging or want to share your organization’s experience (good and bad) with social bookmarking,  the NTEN Affinity Group, NpTagvocates, is a great place for discussion with your peers on these topics.

Act 1:  The Problem

Many nonprofits professionals have to manage a lot of information on the web and share it with their co-workers or clients. In many smaller organizations, where there are not enough resources for a high-end knowledge management system, people end up using their browser favorites or forward links to one another via email. Unfortunately, these methods make sharing and managing information resources difficult. 

Here’s why:

(1)  The folder structure of your favorites list is not always flexible enough to allow for easy cross referencing
(2)  Bookmarks can’t be accessed from different locations or computers
(3)  Links can get lost in email
(4)  Knowledge management is a solitary endeavor, not a social one.

Act 2:   Definitions

Tagging and social bookmarking can be useful techniques for smaller nonprofits to easily share their information resources. But first, some definitions.
 
Tags

Users add tags to describe online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks or text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. For a more detailed definition of tags, see the Wikipedia entry here.

Here are the examples I showed you in the screencast, using the tag “sharpie.”

Photos
Web Pages
Event
Videos
People

For an excellent primer on tagging, see Andy Carvin’s PBS LearningNow essay.
 
Social Bookmarking
 
Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public web site and describing them with tags. You simply register with a social bookmarking site, typically a free service, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate your individual bookmarks as public or private. You can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes that users have created and saved.
 
7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking published by Educause is an excellent introduction to social bookmarking for non-technical folks.

There are many social bookmarking services available on the web. The ones most often mentioned by members of the nonprofit technology community include this short list:

Del.icio.us

Ma.gnolia

Furl

Diigo

If you want a detailed comparison of these and other social bookmarking services, you can read one at Consultant Commons.  If you want to find out who else uses what social bookmarking service in the nonprofit tech sector, check out Social Source Commons.

As mentioned in the screencast, Del.icio.us, which was purchased by Yahoo, is a good place to start. It has a critical mass of users, is fairly easy to use, and it is free. You’ll want to read the Del.icio.us Getting Started Guide as a first step and review other help documents as needed.

Act 3:  The Benefits

  Findability
  People use words that they themselves like to use to categorize things.
  It is more straightforward than choosing a folder.
  The information is one place
 
  Social Aspect

The social aspect is a very important benefit. If you are skeptical, think about having 24/7 access to your co-workers, bosses or a subject matter expert’s bookmarks. Wouldn’t that be useful?

With many people tagging, the social aspect exposes us to the intelligence of the group, which may add other tags, making the resource even more findable. You can read more about how tagging makes knowledge management a more social experience in this paper by Rahmi Sinha, researcher. I like the article and diagram so much, I included it in the screencast.

Marnie Webb’s bookmarks are here. She has also written quite a bit about tagging over at her blog.
 
Easily Share What You Know With Others

Tagging and social bookmarking make it easy to share what you know with others or a community by simply exposing your delicious url. As a trainer, I let people know my del.icio.us url when they ask for additional resources. For example, I’ve tagged lots of nonprofit tagging examples with “nptag” and you can find them here: http://del.icio.us/kanter/nptag

Many organizations use social bookmarking services to share resources more informally with clients than through a web site. A few nonprofits are using socialbookmarking to track resources or follow particular topics for trend analysis for strategic planning. 

Sometimes you may not want to expose all of your bookmarks. Most services offer a “tag as private” feature. (Look in the “settings” to enable this feature in del.icio.us)

As I mentioned in the screencast, you can use RSS and javascript to publish your del.icio.us links on your blog. The Craft Emergency resource list that I showed you in the screencast is done just that way. There is a write-up of the project here.

This article will give you a more detailed description of the benefits:Tagging Gives Web Human Meaning
 
Act 4: Getting Started

I presented a very easy template for using tags and social bookmarking services to share internal information with a team, committee, or a few staff members. There are different ways you can design this project, but this is a very simple approach that you can build on later.
 
Step 1: Discuss Tagging Policy

Tagging can get sloppy – spelling errors, verbs v.s. nouns, etc. You probably noticed that about my tag stream. This can make trouble down the road if you want to publish your resources to a web site using an RSS. So, come up with a few standard tags. But don’t get bogged down – you’re not creating a formal taxonomy, rather it’s a folksonomy. Also, people can add whatever additional tags they want so they can remember the item as well as a description.

If you want to understand more about tag strengths and weaknesses, I recommend the following articles:   

  Tags Strengths, Weaknesses And How To Make Them Work by Robin Good

  Tips for Effective Tagging from TechSoup

  Tips for Tidying Tags by Alexandra Samuel

 
Step 2: Set up an organizational account and get everyone set up

If you are using tagging to manage internal information sharing, it is probably best to set up one account and let everyone have the userid/password. Set up everyone with a bookmarklet tool and show them how to use it.

You can find the FireFox bookmarklet here and the Explorer bookmarklet here.
 
Step 3: Teach people how to start bookmarking!

It is very easy to get started bookmarking as I showed you in the screencast. The most difficult part will be to switch from your habit of using the browser favorites list to the bookmarklet tool. 

 

Step 4: Share the bookmarks

The simplest way to share your bookmarks is to publish or share your del.icio.us url which your username. For example, my username is kanter and my url is:
http://del.icio.us/kanter

You can also share a particular tag such as “tagging” as follows:
http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging

And, you can share any combination of tags as follows:
http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging+nonprofit

If you want to share a resource with a single individual outside your organization and who also uses del.icio.us, you can use the “for:username” tag to direct the resource into that user’s in-box.)
 

Publishing an RSS Feed of Your Bookmarks onto Your Web Site

If you want to publish on your blog or web site, it is a two step process. First you have navigate to the RSS feed scrolling down the to bottom of the page and clicking on the orange RSS icon. For my account, my RSS feed is located at:
 
http://del.icio.us/rss/kanter

You can also navigate to a particular tag, and then find the RSS feed if you want to just publish resources that have been tagged with a particular tag. For example, if I wanted to publish the resources that I’ve tagged with tagging. The URL would look like this:

http://del.icio.us/kanter/tagging

Then you need to sign up a for an account with feedburner. Next cut and paste the URL into the Feedburner tool and follow the instructions. When you get to the options for refining your feed, select “Publicize and Monetize” and then “buzz boost” and follow the instructions. At the end, feedburner spits out some javascript code that you cut and paste into your web page or blog.

For additional project designs and ideas, see the following case studies:

  Craft Emergency Resources

  Nonprofits and Tagging: Two Case Studies

  Dutch Nonprofits Collaborate With Del.icio.us

  Sharing Interesting Web Sites: Development Nonprofits

  Tagging in Art Museums

  Tagging Nonprofit Missions

  Examining Tagging in the Nonprofit World

  If you want to see more, you can find them in my del.icio.us account:
  http://del.icio.us/kanter/nptag+casestudy
 

 

: The Tips

 

  It’s much better to watch these than for me to write about them, but for a quick reminder, here are they:

  1. Edit and clean up your bookmarks
  2. Review your collection by navigating by tag
  3. Browse the bookmarks of colleagues and subject matter experts
  4. If you don’t know their account URL, ask them
  5. Browse by tag and other users when beginning to research a topic
  6. Use in combination with search
  7. Browse the NpTech tag

  Here are some more advanced tips and tricks:
  Seven Habits of Wildly Successful Del.icio.us Users

  Consultant Commons: Blogging and Tagging How-Tos

  Absolutely Del.icio.us Tool Collection

  Complete List of Tools for Del.icio.us

Photo Credits:

Act 1:

Office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyfoo/103060741/
Dogs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42857758@N00/74905059/in/set-684524
Solitary Office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/moriza/

Act 2:
DefinitionsComputer café users: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maebmij/123180774/

Act 3: Benefits

Chocolate Lab: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cbgb/42499133/
Dogs Sniffing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ethan_wuds/
Poco: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessiesan/51310260/

 

Act 4: Getting Started

Meeting: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakecaptive/85332783/

Comments

[Amy Gahran]

Hey Beth -- great tutorial! And that's what I think of these educational experiences as: video tutorials. Yeah, I was never crazy about "screencast," either.

I hear ya about the amount of time it takes to edit and produce a video, especially if you're trying hard to be educational but not boring. Right now I'm wrestling with a similar problem, and I hope to pick up some tricks from you.

The fact is, creating a good educational video takes *a lot* of thought. If you just rattle it off the top of your head, it probably won't be effective.

That said, I've found it helps to record all my video first, complete with zoom & pans and callouts. I write the final version of my script while I'm creating the video. Then I record my audio from. When I bring it all together, I add the title clips.

It's still a pain in the ass, but that process seems to work well for me. Would love to learn from more experienced folks, though.

- Amy Gahran

[Beth]

Amy,

I've got to go watch your screencasts ... Our production processes are fairly similar ...
I do:
1. Research
2. Rough Script - bullet points
3. Storyboard - plot out the screen captures or visuals
4. Build the video - adding in titles and recording the video as I go
5. Record narration -- I practice once, record once - if I'm lucky not to mispronounce a work or screw my syntex
6. Then go back add zooms as needed.

It still takes a lot of time.

I've also experimented with one-shot- very short ones to explain a technique -- sort of micro screencasts.

[Michele]

As always, Beth, good stuff. Thanks for doing this service for the rest of us. :-)

[Alan]

Wow, Beth, this is about the best treatment of social bookmarking for newbies, and a stellar example of both presenting an interesting screncast and providing supplementary materials.

And great use of dogs as supporting actors ;-)

Unlike y'all, I like the word "screencast". It's not video, it's something different.

[iwilker]

Beth, I've been slaving over a social-web-101 wiki for my main client, and I gotta say I'd be lost without you. Thanks for another great, plain-english tutorial.

[Tom McCallion]

Hi Beth,

Great screencast on knowledge sharing. While I have visited del.icio.us many times, I have yet to create an account there. After watching your screencast, I plan to set up an account this weekend.

cheers,
- tom

[Janelle (Social Bookmarking Software - FREE Tool)]

Actually, Social Bookmarking can also be used as a great marketing tool. It allows u to get quality backlink and free web traffic. However, it is important not to submit too often to the same site within the same day. Otherwise, u can get banned by the bookmarking sites as they may think that u are spamming.

OnlyWire dot com and GetBookmark dot com are 2 very handy tool (free of charge). They each allows u to submit to about 15+ bookmarking sites all at one go. But, u must first create your account with each bookmarking site. This can be quite tedious and boring. The other 2 drawbacks are the sites listed are quite limited (some in the list are not even working) and it does not allow u to use keyword phrase as tag.

For those who are seriously looking at tapping the power of web 2.0 social bookmarking sites to generate good traffic and back links, u may want to do as what I have done => invest in software to automate the job. The one I am using right now is pretty neat. It has more sites listed compared to OnlyWire and it can create accounts for u automatically. It also accepts keyword phrase as tag and let u create multiple profiles so that u do not leave too much footprint on the net in case u are accused of spamming. The best part I like about it is that the software gets updated almost every single month to keep in pace with the latest development of some of the bookmarking sites.