Sketchcasting!

I have come across this neat idea while surfing on the net this morning. The video tells it all, but basically what it does is “it emulates the effectiveness of talking to a group of people in front of a white board” as “writing a blog post takes about an hour.” This idea is really neat. I cannot help but think, though, that interestingly we are trying to make use of our old ways (usage of a black board) and trying to accomplish these with the new tech (i guess this is Ed. Tech.’s story). Tempting question is: “is online as effective as face-to-face?” Just kidding : )

“Blogging is great fun, but it can be pretty time consuming. If you track sites like basement.org you’ll see that most of the write-ups are pretty long. It takes quite a bit to gather your thoughts, organize, write a draft, review and revise what you’re trying to get across. Wouldn’t it be cool to somehow recreate the immediacy and efficiency of gathering a few people around a whiteboard and talking for a few minutes?

Sketch.basement.org is an attempt to merge the power of blogging with the “high-bandwidth” experience of talking and scribbling at the same time. It’s called sketchcasting and it’s effectively a podcast with a whiteboard.

Under the hood, they’re just Youtube videos that record the talking-and-drawing experience. They’re recorded, uploaded then shown in typical blog fashion. You can watch them and share them (like any other Youtube videos), subscribe to the RSS feed or even grab the iTunes video podcast feed to watch the sketchcasts on your iPod or iPhone.

One last point, some of the Ideas shared on this lab site may well be conveyed by sketches in the future. I’ve got a couple cued and hopefully I’ll be able to convince some of my fellow Arc90er’s take a crack at it.”