Group items tagged

On my screencasts: I’m not at liberty to discuss the tool I use (you’ll hear soon enough). However, most people ask about the screencasts because of the clarity. Here’s the secret: Capture your screen so you don’t have to compress the SWF. For example, this demo was captured at 960×600 and it’s locked into the player at 960×600. Many people will do a full screen capture at 1024×768. Then they want to put it on the slide which is 720×540. So the SWF gets published down which causes degradation. The next secret is to lock your player so that the image quality remains. Many people will allow the player to scale which causes degradation. Tip: to do a full screen capture, bring your monitor resolution down (it will look fuzzy). Then when you’re done, bring the resolution back up and it will look crisp. I am on a 30″ monitor with a 2560×1600 resolution, but I can bring it down to 960×600 and still get a decent full screen capture. That’s how I did all of the Articulate product tutorials.

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.