VoiceThread – Social Media for Information Professionals

VoiceThread: Introduction to Surrey Libraries Website

I got to know about VoiceThread about three weeks ago during the first week’s class, on Affordance. I checked its About page and fell for it, after seeing the five different ways one can comment. Considering commenting by video, you don’t have to record your video comments, save it, and then upload it to the site. With a webcam attached to the computer, VoiceThread captures your video comment right into the site. Another interesting one is about audio comments, which can be made via telephone. See a demo on commenting by telephone.

The NYPL uses VoiceThread to share information about some of its digital gallery. Libraries, archives, and museums can also use VoiceThread to showcase some of their digital collections. Another way of using VoiceThread in libraries is for creating introductory videos to some of their services. Some are

How to use library catalogue
How to self checkout items
Introduction to the Library’s website
Accessing Library’s Wi-Fi network

I used VoiceThread to introduce the Surrey Libraries website homepage. With the aid of a free screen capturing tool, Jing, I captured images of the homepage of the website. After uploading these images into VoiceThread, they were converted into video clips after adding audio comments on the images. Jing also could capture video clips from the computer screen, and be uploaded into VoiceThread.

I found this experience fulfilling and would be trying other tools, like Glogster to share information in social media sites.

Affordance: YouTube and VoiceThread

After reading McGrenere and Ho, I was able to differentiate between usability and affordance. I think the term usability deals with user’s experience with a system, while affordance deals with the properties of the tools that are utilized to design a system. For example, a blog might not be usable (usability) if “comment” is hidden whether by its location with the post, colour, or/and size. In the case of affordance, the designer of the blog is availed of the tools, i.e. comments, search, blogrolls, tag cloud, and many other widgets, in blogs.

The FVRL maintains a Youtube account that helps both librarians (public library especially) and the public. The videos are educative and serve as resources for librarians of public libraries, especially. Posting comments in a similar fashion as blogs is a good prove of its affordance as a social media tool. Comments in YouTube are only textual. I think this is a limitation to YouTube affordance.

Some people prefer audio/visual to textual communication. VoiceThread gives one the opportunity to comment on posted video (or multimedia file) in different formats other than typing the comments. Thanks to Dean for making reference to VoiceThread in one of the class discussion forums. Its About page is a starting point to know more about its affordance.