Have a look at these video clips on blip.tv – little digital stories about learning created by a group South Australian librarians – ednaworkshops08 . They were created on 26th February at the West Torrens Library Service in a workshop with Kerry Johnson from Education Network Australia. (edna.edu.au ).

This government funded network is billed as “Australia’s leading online resource collection and collaborative network for the education and training community”. If you want to know more about them and cool e-learning tools, you can attend one of their day long roadshows that are visiting each capital city in the next few months, starting in Perth on 28th March.

Kerry said that the librarians were so engaged and excited that they didn’t even want to break for food. How many times do you hear that said about your workday?

The librarians worked with the same set of Flickr photos and Microsoft Photostory. What I like about the clips is how clear the individual voices are. It is very easy to tell Sandra from Josh H. Imagine how engaged our users would feel, and how human the library would sound, if we were telling our stories about our libraries in this way – yes even about how to use the catalogue….

I’ve been running a similar workshop at MPOW – using a voice track, a music track and some standard photos. I used Windows MovieMaker to stitch these together, as it comes standard in the Accessories tab of every Windows installation. In a previous workshop, we used Audacity to create a voice track. I had some thumb drives with some backups of a voice track and some of my photos in case people hadn’t finished theirs.

My example movie, Lego librarian can show you things , is here.

Next time I do it, I think I’ll try letting people use captions and titles if they don’t have a voice track made. I can see how much more effective that is.