Notes from other tutorials

Here were some comments I had while looking through the sample web tutorials available on the Science Information Literacy Wiki. They aren’t all directly relevant to the work I’ll be doing, but simply represent my impressions of what I was seeing.

• In several examples, I heard a lot of background noise (static-like, white noise) when the audio is playing. This is distracting, especially when it makes it apparent that audio was not recorded continuously. This points to the value in having a good microphone.

• The size of the video within the browser screen is important. In some cases I saw videos that were too small, making the text difficult to read. In other cases, the video was too big, so that you couldn’t see the whole image from a screen capture without scrolling.

• I ran in to broken links with some regularity. I think that using a lot of screenshots rather than linking out to other resources can help minimize the possibility of getting dead links in my modules.

• I found it helpful to include relevant information both before and after the actual tutorial. For instance, it is helpful to know how long a module is beforehand, and also to be able to print something at the end of the module.

• My favorite example was from the Yale Whitney Medical Library. Some notable features include: an abbreviated but informative table of contents on the left throughout; switching back and forth between power point-style slides and screenshots, nice zooming in on screenshots so that sometimes the whole screen is viewable (for context) and sometimes there’s a focus on the particular search box being used.