First off, where have I been? Well, besides being obscenely busy at the library, my wife is officially 39 weeks pregnant, which means I have been getting prepared as much as humanely possible for the newest member of our family. 
Back on topic, our university has just subscribed to RefWorks. For those of you familiar with the product will know that they actually have quite a few good tutorials/screencasts on how to use their product. However, to keep my Captivate “chops” working, I decided to create a brief intro tutorial to the product and put our library brand on it and give it a bit more context.
Side note, I find that in teaching RefWorks to my students they don’t really get it, until you show them how it can create a bibliography. Then the ooohs and awws usually occur. However, that is probably a subject for another day, but it does make me think that RefWorks is the ultimate slippery slope product we have. You want to show students how to add references: manually or by exporting from a database. That’s not bad, but I also feel the need to show them how to organize their references and how to create a bibliography or use Write-n-Cite. And those features are somewhat out of our jurisdiction and more for the Writing Center. BUT, obviously the more you show them, the better they will understand it and use it. And this goes back to my Captivate tutorial.
My first instinct, for the tutorial was to try and show as much as possible, going against my own favorable theory on shorter tutorials. This was also my first try in integrating Power Point slides into the screencast.
Now, I passed this tutorial on to a few of my colleagues to get their input. This helped, because there were a few on staff who had absolutely no experience in using the product and it seemed to be a good way to measure the utility of the tutorial. Unfortunately, what followed forced me to rethink and then redo the tutorial. My colleagues were not interested in having us show them all the features, but how a student could one, sign up for an account and then two, export a reference from a database. In a sense, they just wanted something to get them started and show how this product interacts with other library products. So, that is what I did.
And even though I want to tell/promote more of RefWorks, I do think the first tutorial is not only a bit too long, I was also not too happy with some of my graphic choices, such as the color of the text boxes and such.
One more thing of note that I might try again, is using questions like “How do I do this or that?” to frame instruction on a particular feature. But, like all of my tutorial, in a few months I will think I need to redo them in some way.
