For all you nerds out there I’m calling it: The Cloud.

I’m calling it: Stairway to Heaven

Sal Khan has been getting quite a bit of attention lately. He’s been featured on Jon Udell’s blog, described by Bill Gates as his, “favorite teacher,” and awarded a $2 million grant by Google. He makes mathematics screencasts, thousands of them, inside a closet, in his house. His math videos have had over twenty-five million views and his YouTube channel has over seventy-five thousand subscribers. Let’s repeat that again – he’s one person teaching thousands of students math from a closet inside of his house using YouTube and screencasting software. That’s education, 21st century style, my friends.

Imagine the potential of our cognitive surplus. It’s not a pipe dream, it’s happening today. And Kahn isn’t alone. YouTube is rife with people teaching each other how to do things, whether it’s using software, changing the oil in their lawn mower, or the typical middle / high school curriculum fare. Where we learn and how we teach has been and continues to change rapidly. It’s up to us to recognize and grasp the tremendous opportunity that we have. Carpe diem. Seize the day, people of the world. Let’s make the educational opportunities of the 21st century extraordinary.

Check out the Khan Academy in action:

What if classrooms had an open API where parties outside and in could create mashups? What if students could learn at their own pace, but still gather together with others to study in groups that transcend age, ethnicity, gender and nationality? If you can believe it, it’s happening today. This brave new world of learning is being shaped by disparate parties with no apparent connection and often competing goals. It’s a world of constant churn where innovation and ideas make maddening leaps and the connections between people appear out of thin air, and disappear just as quickly. It’s a world where ideas and innovations fail regularly, but are replaced by hundreds of new ideas.

YouTube Social is one such idea. It’s a mashup put together by a group of people who thought it might be nice to watch videos on YouTube with a group of people, sharing a “virtual” remote and a “live” chat room. It’s doubtful they thought two licks about learning, or education, but because of the footprint of YouTube, the readily available, and constantly expanding, educational content, and our ancient social wiring they’ve made a tool that could serve education well. It’s easy to imagine this being used by a teacher / mentor as a discussion and review tool, or by groups of students gathering together online in informal study groups. Now, I have no idea if YouTube Social is going to achieve any substantial amount of active use, but it represents some very interesting ideas about how the web-video experience can be pushed beyond isolated, passive consumption. It’s a pretty compelling idea, err classroom, don’t you think?

Education, as popularly conceived, is but a scarecrow; propped up by tradition, nostalgia and the inertia of poorly tuned institutions. The cognitive surplus of the network has been, and continues to replace our brick and mortar public school system as a learning platform. Today, real education is happening all around us – informally, at scale, on-demand, and fully-participatory. We are all teachers. We are all students. No amount of money, or caucusing will put the genie back in the bottle. It’s time to stop swimming against the current and instead embrace it. The network is the classroom.

Interested in learning more about what we’re going to be up to in @ BlogWorld? Check out this short video.

Because we are increasingly producing and sharing media, we have to relearn what that word can mean. The simple sense of media is the middle layer in any communication, whether it is as ancient as the alphabet or as recent as mobile phones. On top of this straightforward and relatively neutral definition is another notion inherited from the patterns of media consumption over the last several decades, that media refers to a collection of businesses, from newspapers and magazines to radio and television, that have particular ways of producing material and particular ways of making money. And as long as we use media to refer just to those businesses, and to that material, the word will be an anachronism, a bad fit for what’s happening today.

Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

The term education is an anachronism. Please do not misunderstand me, our public systems of education have been hugely successful. They helped create the cognitive surplus that is radically reshaping how we interact, learn and work with each other. However, today our public eduction system is redundant, backwards and calcified. It has become the ancien régime to the revolutionary learning systems and communities that have developed online (e.g. web search, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc). The traditional education has become too slow, too static and, frankly, too inequitable to meet the needs of our ever evolving society. It is built on top of an archaic understanding of our social construct that does not reflect current social behaviors (where and how people learn), learning platforms (the ongoing silicon revolution), and cultural shifts (the integration of the network and social graph). The result is extraordinarily high costs with extremely low returns.

We need to redefine education within the context of the cognitive surplus that exists today. How are people learning today? What systems do they use? How do they work together. If we don’t focus on those questions and instead attempt to patch the ancien régime we’ll continue to fail. It’s that simple. Waiting for Superman won’t work, but we might be surprised by those things surrounding our every day lives that will.

Video runs 3:57.

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

Now, I know what you’re thinking–this cat’s gone off the deep end. He’s read too many fantasy adventure novels and has swallowed the whole magical powers bit hook, line and sinker. You’re right about that last part, but in reality working with After Effects is akin to being handed Harry Potter’s wand, and the rotoscoping / masking techniques you’re learning in this series are a Defence Against the Dark Arts crash course. In 3d Screencasting Episode IV we’re going to be dashing around our screen footage, inverting masks and disappearing windows. It’s not learning. It’s magic! ;-)

Without further ado, it’s time to climb aboard my little screencasting wizards, we’re going for a magic carpet ride!

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

To build this sandwich, we’ll use the rotoscoping skills we acquired in Episode II to trim away screen video footage that we don’t want and expose our transparent window frame. Once we’re done editing we’ll pre-compose our layers together into a single composition (layer) that can be easily repositioned, scaled, or exploded (hells to the yah, as the kids in here in the States say). Whet your appetite and dig in!

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

To date, screencasting has been very utilitarian in practice and application. Cinematography,the art and craft of visual storytelling, is largely eschewed in favor of faithful description. The result is, all too often, a structureless, 2d, static point-of-view video that fails to emotionally connect and provides little to no visual stimulation. It’s a recipe for boredom. We need to change this stale, tired and lazy approach to screencasting and we need to change it now!

What if we could give our screencasts a sense of depth, bring windows, panels and other UI elements to life in a 3d like environment? We can and should give the screen a sense of energy and excitement for our viewers. In fact, it’s imperative for screencasts to visually stimulate the brains of the people watching them. Today, more than ever, with all the distractions and opportunities that exist on the Internet you must give people a reason to keep on watching.

If you’re interested in learning how to shake things up with crazy cool 3d screencasting techniques stay tuned for the next six screencasting episodes on my blog. In part one, Snagit Product Manager Tiffany Wood demonstrates how to use Snagit 10 to grab the transparent Aero windows we’ll use to begin creating 3d objects. Hold on to your hats screencasting nerds–we’re going to bring the fun. ;-)

If you’d like to use the assets in this tutorial and view a completed After Effects sample project you can download the files here.

3d Screencasting Episodes

1. Episode I – It Ain’t Your Daddy’s Screencasting
2. Episode II – Rotoscope Our Problems Away
3. Episode III – Building a Screenshot / Screen Video Sandwich
4. Episode IV – The Magic of Inverted Masks
5. Episode V – Killer Animated Windows
6. Episode VI – Ultra Cool Shadows & Motion Blur

The shell commands you’ll need to build your Automator apps:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
killall Finder

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
killall Finder

*Update*

You can reduce this to a single Automator app that checks the current visibility and toggles to the opposite state using the following bash script:

# checks visibility and stores value in a variable
isVisible=”$(defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop)”

# toggle desktop icon visibility based on variable
if [ "$isVisible" = 1 ]
then
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
else
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
fi

# force changes by restarting Finder
killall Finder

***************************************************************************

And for the truly lazy–a precompiled app that toggles visibility on or off:

http://www.brooksandrus.com/downloads/hide_icons.zip

After viewing you should understand which file streams in the recording application bundle contain audio. Luckily once you’re armed with this knowledge its a snap to import the audio streams along with the screen footage into the video tooling of your choice. Enjoy!

Sometimes limits are a good thing. Now to convince my friends on the Jing team. ;-)

Not so fast. I’m here to tell you that its not just possible, but downright simple to directly import and edit screen recordings made by Camtasia:mac in the video tooling of your choice on the mac. You heard that right – direct import without transcoding the video. No long wait times. No bloated file sizes. Lossless footage. For realz. It’s the shiznit. Check it out.