Santa Barbara Career Symposium: Rich Media on a Poor Budget

Hello symposium participants and curious visitors. These are the notes for a talk up at Westmont for the annual Santa Barbara Career Symposium. This is event started in the 1970s and was revived around 2000. What a pleasure to spend a day with career counseling professionals from the region.

Goal. At the end of this session, we'll be energized after a refreshing chat and group tour of screencasts, and other forms of rich media used to jazz up the delivery of student services. I will demonstrate the process that has emerged at UCSB Career Services and share my hope that it will result in a lot of good, simple-to-enjoy content.

Your tour guide and discussion leader today. I am Don Lubach. Like some of you, I'm an over-extended career counselor trying to reach as many students as possible with good, clear information and resources. I admit to a weakness for technology. I swear that I have never lined up, however, to be the first to purchase a technical product of any kind. At least not over night.

History. I will briefly describe my father's experience with new media in the 1950s and then my 2001 brush with multi-media success. I used video to tackle campus-wide confusion over the new, in-vehicle parking meter

Career Services media & technology history:
Strong web presence, podcasts, blogs, social media, interactive white board, internship video, list servs, and more. We have a culture of innovation and broad participation in technology.

 

Current Examples of rich media on a budget

UCI


 

SBCC

 

UCSB

My Goals:

  • One minute.
  • Good sound.
  • Everybody In: Admin Staff, Student Staff, Campus Visitors
  • Use outside media for basics; create media for UCSB-specific and Career Services-specific topics. Example: interviewing tips vs. how to use GauchoLink to secure an interview.
  • 50-100 videos by this time next year

 

 

 

Tools For Creating and Sharing Content

Our Rig @ UCSB Career - I will share our studio-in-a-box rig with the group allowing everyone to see what we have available for our staff to use to create content. The entire rig was less than we paid for one film to be made about our internship program in the 1980s. If we use it to make a lot of films, it will serve as a great asset for our agency. 

Hardware Highlights

  • For ease-of-use -- MacBook Pro
  • Good sound. We like the snowball microphone. If I could do it again, I'd have purchased the new one with the built in HD camera, the Eyeball.
  • We purchased some accessories for our Canon, 3-chip, DV camera, but for ease of use, we purchased a Kodak Zi6. It fits in your pocket and shoots high quality video.

 

Screen Capture Software.

We're using Screenflow by Telestream Software. There are countless ways to use screen capture software. Here are some examples from the Coverflow information pages.  To minimize chaos during the presentation, I'll roll a short video to demonstrate how coverflow works.

Windows users are lucky to have Adobe Captivate. It has more features. I hope we'll figure out a way to rotate Captivate content into our mix, but we're presently using Coverflow. The long load times for many captivate videos could be a concern for those with slower access, smart-phones, and netbooks. 

 

The process. How we are getting content created

  • Meg Pressley -- soaring on her strengths
  • The Manual -- I used Plasq's "Comic Life" to make the manual.
  • The procedure: 3 slides, one hour, space, and equipment.
  • Encourage creativity and "failing in private."

 

Other places to use your films.

  • Do you have any TVs in your center?
  • Is there a TV system in the dorms/campus dining facility?
  • Pre-roll before workshops?
  • Embed in workshops to change modes.

 

Misc:

Live streaming. Ustream. It is now possible to shoot live video of your career events for free.