Taking on the Hydra

Mosaic Alien on Wall

Photo by Francesco Ungaro from Pexels

Post by Jeffrey Staiger, Humanities Librarian

Imagine the many stages behind the making of a video tutorial that shows the viewer how to perform a basic library task.  You start with the content, the thing that the patron needs to know, all-important motive for the whole endeavor, and yet from the creator’s standpoint, almost nugatory, a given, the soft center around which the whole technological apparatus will be fitted.  Since you know how to get what you want from the library, you have but to analyze your sequences into their component parts. To figure out which subroutines are essential, and which detours, it’s only a matter of running the self-consciousness algorithm in your head and reviewing your process.  Next you create a script, one segment of text per step of the task, and a storyboard with matching visuals.  But there’s a fork here: are you going to go with screenshots or screencasts or some interplay of both?  Decide.  Then create your visuals.  Or rather learn the software to create the visuals (a process with stages of its own, of course, since every node in the story could be unfolded fractally in smaller and smaller learning moments), and then create the visuals.  Don’t forget to make sure you’re using the style cards so that your product is consistent with the university’s branding standards (and enjoy wielding, like a cognoscente, this shop-diction along the way: storyboard, screencast, style card, etc.).  Now comes the choice of software products, each with different strengths and limits.  Sort out the advice, possibly conflicting, from your peers, each of whom has their own predilections and levels of experience, weigh the learning curves, try and err, find the way that works for you.  Now you’re ready for the recording proper.  Suddenly you’re a performer, you realize, having to pay attention to all the sides of communication you don’t consider in everyday discourse and, because you’re now trying to get them right, getting them wrong, misspeaking, transposing, slurring, stumbling.  So erase, discard, rerecord.  Repeat as many times as necessary.  Curse, if it makes you feel better, the fact that things, even when virtual, are not as manipulable as words!  After half a dozen takes, if you’re lucky, you might be able to pronounce your effort “not bad.”  Review what you’ve made, troubleshoot the glitches that fate has cruelly and cunningly crafted to fit your particular weaknesses.  Rerecord again.  Eventually settle on “good enough for your terrestrial purposes.”  Then edit, or rather learn how to handle the editing tool, which of course can be an abyss of its own, but let’s not tarry.  Once edited, download so you can upload to the site where your peers can see it, vet it.  Repeat the recording and editing process until you receive their blessed verdict, “ready to go.”  Then of course there is the packaging and presenting and marketing, internal and external, and the keeping track of the statistics, but these are all matters for another blog post.  You’re done, effectively.  Breathe a sigh of relief: it’s out of your hands for now.

In the spring of this past year, when universities everywhere had to switch to remote learning, a group of librarians at the University of Oregon Libraries formed the Tutorials Task Force in order to make instruction videos to explain library tasks to students.  In its first phase the group focused on meeting students’ immediate information needs – everyday matters like how to find a book, how to find an article, how to distinguish between scholarly and popular sources, etc.  At the same time, the group identified a second goal, implicit in the first but distinguishable from it.  In creating a first set of tutorials, we would acquire the experience and skills to be able to create videos efficiently for other, more conceptually advanced instructional objectives, while also preparing ourselves to assist faculty in the fashioning of video tutorials for their classes.  This dual mission was accomplished: not only did the group mount a handsome suite of more than a dozen videos on the library’s website in time for the start of the fall term, we also gained the desired know-how, particularly with regards to Panopto, the video-creation tool purchased by the university, to build on and share.  Now probably any learning process can be parsed into component parts in the manner incompletely sketched above, but the process of making these tutorials lent itself particularly well to such a conscious tracing of its own stages.  If one were learning about, say, the Thirty Years War, one would read a book on it and the various things one learned along the way would interact with what one already knew or thought one knew about history and Europe and religion and such dicey subsystems as human motivation and the psyche’s tolerance for senseless waste, and it would be hard to pinpoint what one had learned, let alone the steps in which one had learned it.  But making a video tutorial is a discrete, “hands-on,” process, one that has the simplified clarity of a game, bracketed from the rest of experience, with correspondingly distinct objectives, so that afterwards the specific bumps in one’s learning — the moves in the game — were a cinch to track.  A month after completing a tutorial the experience was individual and vivid enough that I was able to rehearse it easily, whereas a month after finishing a book on the Thirty Years War all I would probably be able to tap might be little more than some cloudy impressions and lurid yarns.  The point is that learning to make a video tutorial was gratifying because it was such a pronounced, traversable example of what it is like to learn in general.  It was an education.

Which is not to say that it wasn’t also vexatious.  Often there were tasks I wanted to do and felt  I should be able to do, based on my experience with digital doing on other platforms, but couldn’t do.  Speaking for myself, I’m afraid I have to say that, with its many perplexities and pitfalls, Panopto is not yet a smooth, intuition-friendly program.  At times, in the midst of this endeavor, which involved the more tractable Snagit and PowerPoint programs as well, I succumbed to the defeated sense that every solution to a problem I met with inevitably spawned, Hydra-like, two more problems.  Nevertheless, in the end I had my video.  The learning process had worked — just how well the following anecdote will illustrate: As the group was about to go live with the completed tutorials, it was pointed out to me the information I had included about getting a physical book was out-of-date since the library had changed its policies for the upcoming term.  No problem – a colleague graciously showed me how to insert a slide over the offending stretch in my tutorial, except that it was then noticed that this patch showed a view of my screen that included toolbars at top and bottom, which was inconsistent with the other screen shots in the video.  No problem – having been shown how to insert a slide I just made a new one and inserted that one over the first inserted one, except that this suddenly begot a number of editing problems I won’t go into other than to say that I could see the Hydra starting to rear its ugly head all over again, until I decided that rather than do battle with an invincible mathematical monster it would be easier just to record a whole new version of the tutorial.  In other words, the process it had taken me all summer to learn now seemed the easiest way to circumvent the new thicket of editing problems I was facing.  And in an hour or two, following the steps that were by now rote (and, well, utilizing some of the pieces I already had, such as the script and the storyboard) I did it! I had a new version ready, it joined the others on the library’s website.

The lesson is that in the end technology is only technology, a knowable sequence of instructions to follow, though you might have to write the booklet as you go.  As for the Hydra, if it is the case that every solution introduced two new problems, I also found it to be true that for every problem there was a solution.  In the realm of thought, those two rules breed an interminable conundrum.  Happily, though, video tutorials are made on a more practical plane.