April 14, 2015 (Tuesday)

Time:10:30am-3:30pm  (5)
Hours completed (IST): 126/135
Hours completed (Kara Robinson): 15/15
Accumulated on-site hours: 141/150

After speaking with my on-site supervisor and showing her what I accomplished so far with the LibGuide it was suggested, as I thought it may be, that I was going in the wrong direction. Namely, the policy for guides at KSU is to keep them from becoming too weighed down in text. Because I was designing this as both a source of information and as a quasi-standalone lesson, I was including far too much text. Tammy commented that what I had written was good and that I could probably add it to a blog and link out to it. That way it was still a resource students could look at and it would bring my LibGuide in line with the standards.

This meant completely gutting two pages. The Home and Satire in Brief pages remained unchanged. The latter included about 250 words of text which I felt was central to students becoming grounded in the topic. Where I originally planned to have about five pages, I cut that number back to four. The third page will now be titled Identifying Satirical News. For this page I am planning a short video using screen-capture technology that will give a guided tour of a satirical news site and show how difficult it can sometimes be to locate disclaimer information. The Resources page will be split into two with one including a list of free and academic resources about satirical news and the second will provide a list of online satirical news sites.

After developing a new strategy, I set about making changes. I opted to take this blog, which was originally just meant to house my daily logs, and open it up to act as a professional blog. I reworked some of the text from my LibGuide and used it to create a post that I could link to. I then set about preparing to make the video to embed in the guide. I began by experimenting with several free screen capture tools. While I have previous worked with Screencast-O-Matic, I felt that the free version lacked some valuable feature and chose instead to go with NCH Software's Debut capture software.

With the software decided, I now had to determine a host. Initially, I planned to use Kent State's video hosting service KSUtube; however, I had concerns about accessibility with doing a video. After some research I discovered that YouTube provides a transcription service for people who upload videos. I ended the day by doing a few test runs with Debut and writing up a general script.

While I think the video is a good fit for my goal and I had satisfied some of my concerns about accessibility, I worry that making the video may take more time than I have to invest.