The UK’s Guide to Skills and Learning has published a long eBook.  On page 164 (no permalinks – see criticism below – you have to type 164 in the little search box at the base of their viewer) there’s a 1-page article by a Matt Pierce on the use of screencasting for IT training and support in large organisations.

The article notes that in-house training material can be produced by 1 screencaster (be they internal or external) which can then be delivered by a single internal email to everyone in a large organisation.  The article also suggests that 1 person can make screencasts that trouble-shoot and provide support and that these videos can be distributed on an internal network.

The article does note some obvious use-cases but fails to point out how to get started with screencasting (why not mention some common tools like CamTasia or BBFlashBack?).  If you’re in a large organisation and want a weighty tome that might add support to your pro-screencasting argument, take a look.

I do feel compelled to criticise their delivery mechanism.  They have licensed some sort of real-book Flash engine – the pages render in pretty 3D and distort as you move the mouse just like a real page would.  Lovely.  But slow.  My dual-core 2+GHz machine runs very slowly whilst I try to zoom.  Ads appear next to every page.  Things blink at me.  And there aren’t any hyperlinks.  Could someone show them how to write a simple pdf eBook please?

The “UK’s Guide to Skills and Learning” eBook mentions Screencasts by ProCasts' Blog about Professional Screencast Production, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England License.

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