My 2000th blog post! I celebrate with Toonway and Xtranormal

This is the 2000th post on this weblog, which started in September 2005. In fact the total for the Information Literacy Weblog is more than this, as it ran in a similar form under different software from April 2003, until the server it was on got hacked into in 2005.

I have celebrated this milestone by using two cloud-based applications I just came across. The first one allows you to create animated cartoon frames easily (Toonway, a French application that is targetting the English-speaking market, although some fragments of French remain).
I am not sure whether this has been used much for information literacy, but the second one, Xtranormal Movie Maker certainly has. There has been a recent discussion on the North American ili information literacy discussion list about videos for explaining Boolean Operators, and one of them was made using Xtranormal. When I played it, loads of other Xtranormal information literacy videos popped up.
The speech is synthesised, and I think this means that anything serious swiftly starts to sound like a parody of itself, but some people have used this to good advantage. Just as examples, these four all deal with evaluating websites: http://youtu.be/dKVL1ehDQB0; http://youtu.be/5No4TOu5v84; http://youtu.be/TVh6dma6vJ0; http://youtu.be/kO3dOD6-UAY.
When you sign up, you start with 300 points and then pay points for using characters and sets: you are bound to run out of points after doing a couple of videos unless you use the same characters and sets all the time. It is easy to do a video quickly (you type in the dialog, and it synthesises it immediately) - it is also very easy to do rather bad videos. Below is my own celebratory effort, in which Bruce asks what Information Literacy is, and Sheila tells him. It is only 40 seconds long.



By the way, the above isn't my main Youtube account (that's http://www.youtube.com/user/sheilawebber)

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