[FM Discuss] FM Newsletter

[John Curwood]

  FM News 2012-07

 1. FM used to design a challenge for P2PU.
 2. News from the global communities.
 3. FM tips.
 4. Digital Manual Scoping Study involving FLOSS Manuals.
 5. Editors note
 6. Spotlight - VLC.
 7. Editors note.


    FM used to design a challenge for P2PU

Mick Fuzz has spent some time overt the last 2 months reworking material
from FLOSS Manuals into a workbook to be used in a P2PU (Peer 2 Peer
University) challenge. P2PU is a website devoted to open education
(https://p2pu.org/). A P2PU challenge consists of a series of learning
steps and participant needs to carry out. After completion of the
challenge, participants receive a badge specific to the challenge they
have undertaken.

Mick wanted to go beyond just writing comprehensive software manuals to
creating resources that could be used by workshop facilitators and
self-motivated learners and thought that P2PU was the perfect testing
ground. He chose to create a challenge around setting up email
encryption in the Mozilla Thunderbird email application. Due to the open
licences used by FM, Mick was able to easily extract the necessary
material from the Basic Internet Security manual and re-purpose it for
his P2PU challenge workbook.

This is a great example of how you can use FM as a repository of
information that to re-work into the perfect resource for your needs. To
check out and take the /Encrypt and sign your email with Thunderbird/
challenge, go to
https://p2pu.org/en/groups/encrypt-and-sign-your-email/. For Mick's
thoughts on the process, read his article posted on FLOSS Manuals blog
(http://www.FLOSSmanuals.org/news/notes-lab-designing-challenge-p2pu).


    News from the global communities

The biggest piece of news from the Finnish FM community is the
translation of the Basic Internet Security manual into Suomi (Finnish).
You can find the translated manual
at: http://fi.FLOSSmanuals.net/internet-tietoturvan-perusteet/
<http://fi.flossmanuals.net/internet-tietoturvan-perusteet/>.  As a
manual about protecting yourself online, Basic Internet Security is a
must for everyone and it's great to see it translated into yet another
language. If you wish to contribute to the Finnish translation, the
manual still requires some cleaning up, and the pictures need to be
changed into Finnish versions.


    FM tips

With a large manual to create, you may find yourself forgetting all the
items you want to include in the manual. This situation becomes even
worse if there are several people working on the manual as you may think
someone else was going to edit a certain chapter, while they thought you
were going to edit that chapter. Creating a Todo list for you manual
removes the uncertainty around what has and what hasn't been done.

To set up a Todo list:

 1. Open the edit page for your manual.
 2. Click on the *Todo* tab above the table of contents.
 3. Click the *Add a Todo*button.

    A new Todo item is added to your manual.

 4. Edit the item text and click save to keep the changes.
 5. Keep adding items as necessary.
 6. Once a Todo item is complete, click the red minus *(-)* button at
    the right of a Todo item to delete it.


    Digital Manual Scoping Study

FLOSS Manuals has been participating in a scoping study on the 'Digital
Manual', funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The scoping
study lasted two months with researchers interviewing various members of
four case study groups, then earlier this month, researchers and members
of the case study groups to discuss the initial findings and plans for
moving forward. Mick, who has been a very active FMer lately was on hand
to represent the FLOSS Manuals Foundation.

FM's main takeaways from the discussion were:

  * There are varying ideas of what constitutes a 'Digital Manual'
    without a single agreed-upon definition.
  * Many groups could benefit from the use of FLOSS Manuals Foundation
    tools and methodology.
  * While FMF wants to continue partnering with representatives in the
    educational space, it is important that we continue to focus on our
    core work: The creation of Free Manuals for Free Software.

View the FMF post on the Digital Manual Scoping study:
http://www.flossmanuals.org/news/digital-manual-scoping-study-involving-floss-manuals
.

For Mick's in depth review of the the discussion go to :
http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/


    Editors note

I've been out of action in FM for the past couple of months due to
first, getting the worst case of flu ever and then being on the road for
work for a number of weeks. But I found myself inspired as I re-engaged
back into the FM community. There are always so many incredible things
going on in FM and the resources available are constantly growing. I
don't have much in particular to say this month except that this is a
great community to be  part of (made up with so many amazing people),
and I look forward to seeing what it will grow into in the future.


    Manual Spotlight - VLC

VLC media player is a cross-platform media player, notable for the fact
that it is available to such a vast range of operating systems,
(including iOS and Android, although these two versions still appear to
be in the early stages of development) and that it can play almost any
media file including free formats such as the Ogg video format.

Not only does VLC play files from your computer, you can play optical
discs such as BluRay and DVDs (of course you also need the necessary
hardware to play these media), and you can play media streamed across
the internet. As mentioned in the manual, VLC media player is like a
swiss army knife, it's not just a media player, you can also convert
media from one format to another, copy media from CDs and DVDs, and send
live audio or video across the internet.

The manual starts off with the typical /"how to install section"/, but
it does give a nice spotlight on using the software repositories in
Ubuntu. It then goes into instructions on playing media, whether it is
on a drive on your computer, an optical disc, or being streamed across
the internet. This section also includes instructions on viewing
subtitles, whether they come from the same source as the video file or
from a separate source. The manual finishes by covering some advanced
features such as /"Creating your own audio/video streams"/ and
/"converting media files from one format to another"/. The manual
provides very good detailed instructions for using a number of VLC's
many features.

*How you can help*

As I said above, this is a nice comprehensive manual, however, it was
written for versions 0.8 to 1.0. The current release is 2.0.1 and there
have been many changes and improvements to VLC since the manual was
written, especially in the interface. So we need your help to update the
manual to cover the latest version of VLC, new screenshots are needed
for the interface design and some instructions need to be modified as
their commands have moved to a new location. These are nice easy changes
and they will help keep the VLC manual up to date and current. If you
want to sink your teeth into something more substantial, you can
document some of the new features that have appeared in VLC since
version 1.0 such as the Media Library, which includes access to online
content like Archive.org's Free Music Charts and Jamendo Selections
playlists.

VLC is a great software and we have a great foundation manual, it just
needs your help to bring it up to date.

 

Catch you next month.

John

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