Making Tutorials Collaboratively

This was an extremely challenging assignment. It was very late on the night of September 10 when my group finished upgrading our computer. Understandably, we were anxious to get home, so we did not spend much time planning how to produce the tutorials. We got some video and some still shot of the process. So, we decided that I would produce some labeled and captioned still shots as well as slides for formatting a hard drive, installing OS, and learning about computer security. Roslyn and Gina would write scripts. Roslyn would get the video to Jil, and Jil would edit it all together to create the tutorials. All these moving parts were fairly challenging to coordinate.

The first thing I did was to post all of my photos to Picasa so the other group members could use them as a resource for their tasks. I used PowerPoint to create the slides, and saved them as JPEG files. Unfortunately, I discovered that PowerPoint will save slides only at 92 dpi. I thought that would not be good enough for the tutorial, so I found out how the change the registry key forcing PowerPoint to save JPEGS at 200 dpi. That was an interesting exercise.

Since I had not done much of anything with Movie Maker before this project, I had to quickly learn how import clips, create a timeline, add audio narration, and render a movie. I can see myself using those skills in the future.

Through working on this project I was reminded of how important planning is for any group effort. I am pleased with the final results of these tutorials, and I believe we will do a better job planning for the next batch of tutorials. It's all about learning by doing!

See the Artifact section for links to the tree parts of our first batch of tutorials.