Tim’s Blog

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while: six ‘one page guides’ (ok, so actually one of them has two pages..) that I created for the Video Change project with Oxfam.

These are slightly different from the usual ‘one page guides‘ - but hopefully they may prove useful to others running in person or online training around the basics of making video for the web, or about using online video in activism and campaigning.

1) Six Steps to Online Video

An overview guide created to step participants in the course through capture, transfering, editing and uploading their video content.

Step 5 of the guide is specific to Video Change - so would need changing for any other use.

Download the PDF here, or get the original Word Document for editing here.

2) Collecting videos with VodPod

Whilst we had some problems with getting the VodPod widgets to work properly we did use it in Week 2 of the Video Change course to invite participants to collect and share their favorite videos. There is definitely potential for VodPod as a tool for use by Youth Services and websites to clip and display some of the best positive video clips on the web direct to their websites and blogs.

Again, this guide includes some Video Change specific bits in the ‘challenge’ box - so you download the VodPod PDF here, or download the original word document to update this guide for your own settings.

3) Finding and using Stock Footage

This guide should be generic and ready to do without adaptation and includes five sites to search for creative commons and public domain footage.

So if you regularly try and explain to people how they can use stock footage in their video making you might find it handy and it is ready for download as a PDF here. Of course, you may want to download the MS Word file original and change the list of stock video sources to point to your own favourites.

4) Sharing Videos on YouTube

This one page guide includes tips for upload a video to YouTube and for getting it seen by careful naming of the video and using the playlist, favourite and sharing features.

You can download the PDF here, or get the world file to edit from here.

5) Six approaches to Video Change

As part of the Video Change course we explored different ways in which campaigners could add online video their the campaigning toolbox. This guide outlines six different ways in which video can be used in activism - from video petitions through to video reporting and using video conversation tools like Seesmic.

Get the PDF here, or download the word file for editing and creating your own version.

6) Creating a Sisters on the Planet clip

The final module of Video Change invited participants to create their own Sisters on the Planet video clips. If you’re running a video making course you could do worse than to set creating a Sisters on the Planet video making challenge to your students - and I’m sure Oxfam would be happy to feature and use some of the resulting clips. This guide is also available to adapt for other video making challenges.

Get the PDF to use it as it is, and download the word file if you want to play around with it for your own projects.

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As with all the one page guides these are all licensed under a Creative Commons license to allow them to be adapted and re-used. However, please do note the request for these guides in particular that if you do find them useful that you credit Oxfam.org.uk and consider making a donation or taking a campaign action from here in return for getting the resources for free.

Remixed One Page Guide

Michele Martin has just dropped me an e-mail with a link to some remixed versions of the one page guides series.

Designed for the Innovation in Learning conference, Michele has remixed the following:

One Pager on Finding-Reading Blogs
One Pager on Flickr
One Pager on Netvibes and RSS
One Pager on Wikis
Social Bookmarking One Pager

You can find the original one page guides they are based on here.

Which reminds me to ask:

• Have you been using any of the one page guides? Are there other remixed copies out there that I don’t know about?
• What should be next in the series? I’ve not created any for a while - but I’m hoping to put together one or two new guides soon - what you would like to see?

Update: Lacona Coy has put together a post linking up the One Page Guides with Commoncraft videos for each. A handy getting started reference.

A few additions to the one page guide series, this time developed for the 2gether festival. Blogger here mainly for people in the Talking Tech session. You can find a range of other guides here.

We've got a new overview of Twitter (PDF)

An experiment with a more image based style for an overview look at tagging (PDF).

And a How To for the CrowdVine conference social network in use at the festival.

You can find the original files for each of these guides (created in iWork Pages on the mac) below - and they are all licenced under Creative Commons so you're free, indeed you are encouraged, to take and adapt these for your needs. (Erm - it's a bit of a slow upload here from the venue WiFi - so I'll post the original files later on…)

Tomorrow the Buzz Off campaign will be launched. The youth led Buzz Off campaign is calling for a ban on mosquito devices, and you can hear the campaign team talking about the mosquito devices in this video.

What has this got to do with Google Alerts? Well - if you're launching a new campaign you probably want to keep track of the sort of coverage it's getting. And it's not just converage in the mainstream press that matters, but converage right across the web. And that's where Google Alerts come in.

Google Alerts lets you set up certain keywords that Google will track for you. As soon as it finds new webpages, blog posts, news stories or documents containing those key words, you get an e-mail to let you know.

So with Google Alerts the Buzz Off campaign can see who is talking about them, and, where that's happening on the interactive web, they can offer input and responses to conversations taking place.

To let members of the campaign know about setting up a Google Alert, I quickly put together this one page guide. It's available as a PDF for printing, and, as with all these one page guides, is creative commons licenced - so you can also download the original Word document and adapt it to meet your needs.

These two one page guides were written very specifically for the Young Researcher Network launch conference and look at online video editing and using the voicethread tool for collaboratively narrating slide shows and presentations.

I was introduced to VoiceThread by Al Upton and the miniLegends during the 31-days to a better blog challenge this summer. It's a really interesting tool, and so, with this one page guide my aim has been to offer an introduction to VoiceThread, but to leave open to discussion it's possible applications. I'd love to hear stories from those who have used VoiceThread in any consultation, participation or youth work contexts.

You can download the introduction to VoiceThread as a word file here (PDF coming when I get hold of a better PDF convertor which handles translucency without it looking horrible…).

The second guide outlines how you can edit video online using MotionBox. For users whose computer systems are firmly locked down by the corporate or local authority IT department, online editing may well present one of the best options for quickly creating and sharing effective video content.

You can download the Online Video Editing with Motionbox guide as a PDF here, or grab the original word file to modify from here.

MotionBox is one of many tools that have recently emerged for editing video online. I chose it for this guide as, of those I knew at the time, it seemed to offer the best 'walled garden' of video content that I felt comfortable using with a group of young people aged 13 to 25. I'm planning to explore JayCut as an alernative tool worthy of a one page guide soon.

Does anyone reading have experience with other online video editing tools? Which would you recommend?

These two one page guides were written for the Young Researcher Network launch conference where they were used as part of a session introducing social media tools for young researchers.

I've always found geographic and mapping visualisations to be really helpful in participation projects (as in this series of workshops on the local offer), and so these two guides explore how Google Earth and the My Maps feature of Google Maps can be used to add an online dimension to community mapping projects.

In the 'Custom Online Maps - with maps.google.com' guide I've tried a new technique, picking up on the annotated screen shot style of Sue Waters (example here) to show the different options available on My Maps.

You can download 'Custom Online Maps - with maps.google.com' here as a PDF for printing, or if you want to edit and adapt a copy, grab the original word file here.

The 'Mapping your community with Google Earth' guide explains:

Google Earth allows you to view high resolution satellite images of your local area on a 3D globe.

You can add annotations and notes onto Google earth to record information about your area.

You can add lines and shapes to mark out particular areas on your map.

You can share your annotations so that they can be accessed on Google Maps (maps.google.co.uk) or in other mapping tools.

You can download the 'Mapping your community with Google Earth' guide as a PDF here, or as a word document for editing it is available here.

This guide is only a very brief introduction and is very specific in having been designed for a 25 minute mini-workshop introducing Google Earth. I'm mainly sharing here for those who were at the workshop and have asked for a copy…

The Young Researcher Network launch conference where the workshop took place also explored how you can use Flickr to create a photo map. There is an earlier guide that mentions that to be found here.

I wrote this one page guide on running an online survey in response to a suggestion from Damien at ChangeMakers Virtual Volunteering programme, and to go towards a section on online consultation and participation I've been putting together for Participation Works.

You can download the guide for printing here (PDF), or for editing here (Word doc).

The guide gives an overview of setting up and running an online survey with SurveyGizmo.com. The sharp-eyed reader will notice that in fact the screen-shot in the guide is of a SurveyMonkey survey. This is no particular reason for this other than I had that particular survey open at the time. And it shows diversity.

As with all the guides in this series, it is aimed at someone who has perhaps heard of online surveys (or blogs, rss and wikis etc.), but doesn't really know what they have to offer or how to get started. The guide is designed to at least show that it's not that scary - and that these online tools have real practical applications.

I'm planning to experiment with some more 'platform agnostic' guides in the near future - but so far I've found that because every provider names things slightly differently ('analyse responses', 'create report' etc.) it gets quite difficult to create something that will help a new user feel secure rather than worried…

Another post in the one page getting started series. This time taking a look at the humble wiki.

From the document:

A wiki page is a bit like a whiteboard. All you need is a marker pen and you can change the content of the whiteboard. On a wiki page, just search for the edit link and you can change the page contents directly from your web browser.

Unlike a whiteboard, however, a wiki will store a history of page changes so you can see how a page has changed over time, and can bring back an old version if you want to.

A wiki website is build up of interlinked wiki pages. It is easy to create new pages. Wiki pages are usually created in plain text with special ‘markup’ to indicate links and formatting.

You can download the guide for printing here, or for editing here.

Because of the group I designed it for, this version of the guide suggests that users get familiar with the wiki concept by trying to edit a relevant page on Wikipedia, and then uses Wikispaces as it's example of a build-your-own wiki. This may not be suitable for all groups - but, as the sheet is Creative Commons licenced you are free to apapt it to suit the context you are working in.

A few wiki links:

• Wiki Patterns - a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns that will make a wiki work - and a guide to the different stages of introducing a wiki into a group or organisation setting.

  I particularly like the Barn Raising pattern, which reminds me, Watford Gap and I had earlier this year thought about a UK not-for-profit bit of wiki barn-raising on Wikipedia. A new-years-resolution project for 2008 perhaps..

• Wikis in plain english - excelent video introduction to wiki concepts by Common Craft.
• Wikispaces - Free hosted wiki of choice for most of the mini-collaborative projects I've come across.
• DokuWiki - a suprisingly powerful and effective wiki system to install on your own servers or intranet. My wiki of choice for keeping myself organised on a day-to-day basis.

This is the next in my series of one-page getting started guides - and the first of quite a few to be posted this evening.

The concept for these guides is fairly simple, although one I'm still experimenting with.

The goal is that each sheet should take someone from not knowing what a particular social media tool is, nor how they would use it - to at least having taken the first steps to using it in a sensible and sustainable way. And it should do that in no more than one side of A4.

So - attached to this sheet is a getting started guide on 'Finding and Reading Blogs'.

You can download this as a PDF for printing, or a word document to edit and adapt for your own use.

If you or the target audience you may use this sheet with have not already started using an RSS reader then you may find it useful to start with this guide on reading RSS/Blog feeds with NetVibes.

Engaging effectively and honestly with the social web involves listening a lot more than you speak; reading a lot more than you write.

One of the first tools I introduce to clients interested in exploring social media is some form of RSS reader. An RSS reader is a tool to agregate conversations and information from across the social web into one place - making it easier to listen as a foundation for engaging.

Recently, my reader of choice (for those starting out) has been NetVibes. So, here is the next in my series of one page guides - this time looking at NetVibes.

You can download the guide as a PDF here.

The guide is Creative Commons licenced, so you are welcome to use it in your own work, and to adapt it (Word copy attached below) to contextualise it for different audiences or groups.

For example: In the original copy of this guide I wrote for a client I created a customised NetVibes tab with a range of tools they might find useful and provided a TinyURL link to this as the first step of getting started, instead of pointing people straight to the front page of NetVibes. That way, users could immediately see how NetVibes was relevant to them, instead of first encountering the standard NetVibes modules and tools which are set up for a very different audience.

I'd love to hear about any use you make of this guide.