Education Ideas

[evilgourmet]

Hello,

We are all learning new and relearning old ways to do things on Ubuntu and Linux systems in general. There are also things we do everyday that may be common for us which are otherwise Sanskrit to the uninitiated.

What I am proposing is this:

Record our actions, using whichever desktop recording software we want, in ogg or other open format , explaining how the software works with simple howto videos.

I know there are videos like this on the internet yes, but we can repackage these INTO our release of Ubuntu -- with some step-by-step videos. Its simple to replace the Firefox start page with one of our own choosing, and the bookmarks as well -- all of these videos could be on the CD, with links to other videos online -- simple as YouTube (or other video site) links within the page.

I think this may be a way for the user base to grow, and to set US apart from the other teams.
Let me know what you think, we could do this in a FEW days, I can make a CD in a matter of hours, totally customized for this, but WE all have to jump in the pit.

Just my two quarters,

Jeff Martin (evilgourmet)

[slofgren]

Jeff Martin (evilgourmet),
I think that is a great idea. We could even supply a second disk to store all our other How-to's. i agree we should stay with open-source formats but that is not hard. Most recording software that runs on Linux supports those. What do you need from those willing to "jump in the pit" or do you just want our support?

[IanMcewen]

Said this in the channel, but. I think it might be better if we were to do screenshot tours with text in-between, as this may be easier for people to do; either way, it is some effort; videos of daily use aren't going to be amazingly helpful, there has to be explanation. Additionally, things would need to be fairly complete (and we'd probably want multiple people working on any given tour). Additionally, screenshot tours would be smaller in terms of disk space, and easier to view on the target computer. They also might be easier to effectively index (one large home page and a search function would do, similar to the DVDs and CDs from Project Gutenberg). An example of the type, if not exactly the topic, of what I was thinking can be found here. (http://imcewen.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/a-very-short-introduction-to-gmailgoogle-docs-as-a-collaborative-tool/)

That said, this seems like an awesome idea. I think the first person you'd want to talk to in terms of volunteering/setting up workers would be br24; he's the one in charge of Education Team, which I think this would fall under. We might even include his excellent summaries of options for software (look on the Education Team page) as our first additions to our special ubuntu-arizona help system!

[johnc4510]

This seems like a great idea to me. This should be something that br24 is in on too. My experiences with recording my desktop applications have been less than satisfactory to date, so I would tend to agree with ian on a screenshot tour type of thing. Maybe on a serparate CD for the following reason. Disk space on the Ubuntu Live CD is very limited as the iso is about 670 mbs I think. We would also need to get a target list together of what we would want to include in this project.

Nice idea Jeff :)

[bribri124]

This is an idea I pushed out over a month ago (LoCo Collaboration - Kentucky (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=461200)). However, that was only putting together a CD of available Screencasts already built. This idea is much better and will definitely go a long way on showing what this team is capable of doing, as well as our devotion on helping others with Ubuntu.

I already began placing Screencasts into the Education Team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArizonaTeam/Teams/Education) under Chat Clients (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ArizonaTeam/Teams/Education/Chat) (Pidgin and XChat-GNOME). I planned on using more as I found them, but this will greatly increase our horizon on which items we want to have Screencasts for.

I fully support this idea, and I am already looking to how I can get started doing this. We should start determining what applications/tasks we want to create a how-to on. I agree with Ian, we should have an explanation for each Screencast. I also prefer to using open source formats, but I do believe we should also create these files under any other available format possible. For example, if somebody obtains one of these CDs and has an existing Windows system, it is guaranteed he/she can view these videos under his/her configuration? I believe this should only be done for certain areas for the pre-Ubuntu user, i.e. initial installation/configuration.

I thank you for this excellent idea, Jeff.

Brian

[bribri124]

Quick update...

I started looking around, and there is a Screencast Team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam) already setup for this idea, although I cannot verify how active this team is. So I started to dig into this, and they have setup a page for Recording Screencasts (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam/RecordingScreencasts). This should definitely help out those of us (i.e. me) who have not done anything like this before.

Brian

[sloggerkhan]

This is a good idea. In the past I haven't been able to have a functional computer while recording a screencast, though. Slowed it down too much. I'm going to look at that page and see if there's some advice.