Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Introduction To The Creative Commons


Jon Udell inspires me. His screencasts on so many things are not only very insightful, but have offered me numerous shortcuts to understanding various things to do with the screen world I live in.

I bring to screencasts an alternative method
. The combination of MP3 and PDF. I love the flexibility of both these formats, and bringing them together offers screencasting he same level of flexibility. Uses can now download a screencast a fraction of the size of a video screencast, they can listen to the MP3 on their players away from the computer, and similarly view the PDF on screen or in print while they travel on the bus.

I have attempted to create these screencasts so that they can be used independently of each other, so the MP3 describes the screen and the PDF has a transcript. Sure it takes a fraction longer, but the tools used to create this alternative are common and freely available, while the screencapturing tools used to create video screencasts are not, though as Jon Udell points out, specialist software is becoming less of an issue.

Anyway, give this screencast on using the creative commons.org site a whirl. Let me know what you think. But keep in mind, or feel free to add to my objectives:
  1. To come up with a very easy way to create screencasts
  2. using the barest minimal resources
  3. outputting to common formats
  4. resulting file must be small (preferably under 2 meg) and so portable on storage disks, email, and repositories with file size restrictions.
  5. resource must be flexible in use, on screen, in print, on portable media players.
  6. Each file must stand alone and not necessarily require the other for successful use.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.



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