Category: SMUG

SMUG 100-Level Courses on the Way

While our 100-level curriculum for Podcasting has been completed (and we have a strong start in Yammer, too), I’m feeling the need to finish the entry-level sequence, particularly in Facebook.

So for long-time SMUGgles, you may find some of the upcoming posts a bit elementary, but please bear with us…and take this as an opportunity to “give back” by sharing your experiences in the comments.

I have about 15 courses at the 100 level that I’ve identified by haven’t completed, so I’m going to try to get those finished in the next couple of weeks.

And meanwhile, if anyone wants to develop an official SMUG seal, that would be much appreciated by generations of SMUGgles yet to come.

SMUG Reading List 10/27/08

Some helpful recent readings on social media from other sites:

  • Now you can link to a specific spot within a YouTube video. So if you find an interesting spot in a YouTube video that you want to share, you can direct people to that portion instead of making them watch the whol thing (or saying something like “scroll ahead to the 1:45 mark.”) Learn how and see an example of deep linking on  YouTube courtesy of TechCrunch.
  • Wikipatterns has interesting thoughts on how to spur adoption of wikis in your organization (and how to eliminate barriers to adoption.)
  • TwitThis is “The new ‘share this’ for Twitter.” You can drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar, and then easily share whatever page you’re currently viewing through Twitter.
  • And Brian Solis has a helpful post cataloging the Twitter tools (including TwitThis) that are available to make Twitter even more useful for community and communications professionals.

Social Media 202: Screencasting

Screencasting is a way of letting other people see what is on your computer screen. It lets you capture either the whole screen or a particular portion and create a movie file that you can upload to a video sharing service like YouTube or Facebook.

The benefits of a screencast are obvious, particularly for SMUG. Instead of a slideshow of a sequence of static screen shots uploaded to Slideshare.net and synched to a sound file (pretty good alliteration, huh?), we can now show and tell with full motion, so you can see exactly how to do things. Pictures are extremely helpful, but movies should make the teaching clearer and the learning easier.

But how do you (or I) turn my computer screen into a movie?

For Mac OSX, Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X is an excellent screencast software choice. It’s easy to use, and I was most pleased that it not only delivers great movies of my Mac screen, but also my Windows XP partition. You can see that example in this post on social sharing with WordPress.com. Unlike most of what you see in SMUG, Snapz Pro X isn’t free: it costs $69. But I think it’s worth it for the power it gives you.

Just to show how far you can go with this, I decided to do a demo screencast using Flip video of me addressing my fellow SMUGgles from the front porch of Old Main:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvJepnorgdY]

Steps involved in this were:

  1. Shoot the video of me talking using a Flip on a tripod.
  2. Transfer the file to my Mac and open in QuickTime
  3. Play the video at half-size, while capturing the surrounding 640 x 480 window using Spapz Pro X screencast software, and then saving to a QuickTime movie file.
  4. Open that file and repeat the cycle, creating another QuickTime file that could again be played at half size.
  5. After repeating a couple of more times to create the “hall of mirrors” effect, edit the pieces together using iMovie or Final Cut.

The point, besides having some fun showing a movie of a movie of a movie, was to show that through screencasting you can do show-and-tell training demonstrating anything on your computer screen.

Ironically, the only thing I can’t screencast using Snapz Pro X is a step-by-step introduction to using Snapz Pro X!

I still like Slideshare and will use it to some extent (particularly for the Snapz Pro X course), but I think a screencast can be a much more effective way to teach.

If you’re a Windows user, this list from Mashable has some screencast software alternatives.

What do you think? How could you use screencasting for your training programs?

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RAQ – What is a SMUGgle?

Even though we don’t have our own sports teams (which helps us keep tuition down!), Social Media University Global still needs a nickname for our student body. Referring to the whole bunch as “SMUG students” has an unfortunate connotation, but until a few weeks ago it was the best I could do.

Then, in a comment on this post, Jim Streed suggested “SMUGgles” as the collective shorthand designation. For those who haven’t read the Harry Potter books, it’s a take-off on J.K. Rowling’s name for ordinary mortals, Muggles: those who lack magical powers.

And while “muggles” is sometimes used pejoratively by Harry’s peers, SMUGgles is a label we should all wear proudly. It reinforces one of the founding principles of our institution:

You don’t have to be a wizard to get magical results with these powerful tools.

Everything you see here is accomplished through free or ridiculously inexpensive services like YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and WordPress.com, and with no professional IT support. And with SMUG you can work through the learning process step by step, until you feel confident using these tools in your organization.

But having chosen SMUGgle as our “team name,” that still left us with one problem. We all can picture a Cardinal, or a Blue Jay, or a Viking, but what does a SMUGgle look like? What could be our school mascot?

For now, we’re going with something that bears an eerie resemblance to the “I just joined Facebook” avatar that represents all of us on that social networking platform until we upload a picture. Somehow that seems appropriate, because it shows that SMUG is not only open to newbs, it’s intended for beginners.

But with that, I also want to renew the call for those, newb or not, who have artistic abilities and would like to design a new masthead and logo for SMUG. It would be great to have an official seal that incorporates our Latin motto, Suus Non Ut Diffucile, and if we could get an original drawing for the SMUGgle mascot, that would be fantastic, too.

If the Obama campaign can have an official seal complete with a Latin motto, why not SMUG? To borrow a phrase, “Yes, we can!”

I promise that once we select a SMUG seal, we’ll use it a lot longer than Obama did.

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Welcoming an Associate Professor

It’s been rewarding over the last several months to see the number of “students” at Social Media University, Global climb to more than 150, and to have so many countries represented, literally putting the “Global” in SMUG.

Another goal has been to get more “faculty” members, and to have “associate professors” with experience in different areas contributing their expertise. That’s why I’m so excited to have Jan Husdal providing the Blogging 107: Typepad Pros and Cons course. An added bonus is that he’s from Norway, so now we also have two continents represented among the faculty.

I have appreciated learning from Jan through his Typepad vs. WordPress blog; he’s responsible for helping me find out how to add the social sharing buttons you see on some of the newer posts here.

I know you will find his posts helpful, too.

If you see any of the courses in the proposed curriculum that you would like to write, or if you have ideas for class offerings that you think would be helpful and interesting to others, please get in touch with me through the e-mail you see in the Contact the Chancellor sidebar.