<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<h1>FM News 2012-07</h1>
<ol>
<li>FM used to design a challenge for P2PU.</li>
<li>News from the global communities.</li>
<li>FM tips.</li>
<li>Digital Manual Scoping Study involving FLOSS Manuals.</li>
<li>Editors note</li>
<li>Spotlight - VLC.</li>
<li>Editors note.</li>
</ol>
<h2>FM used to design a challenge for P2PU</h2>
<p>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 (<a
title="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/"
href="https://p2pu.org/" data-mce-href="https://p2pu.org/">https://p2pu.org/</a>).
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em><span class="school_header">Encrypt
and sign your email with Thunderbird</span></em> challenge, go
to <a
title="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/"
href="https://p2pu.org/en/groups/encrypt-and-sign-your-email/"
data-mce-href="https://p2pu.org/en/groups/encrypt-and-sign-your-email/">https://p2pu.org/en/groups/encrypt-and-sign-your-email/</a>.
For Mick's thoughts on the process, read his article posted on
FLOSS Manuals blog (<a
title="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/"
href="http://www.FLOSSmanuals.org/news/notes-lab-designing-challenge-p2pu"
data-mce-href="http://www.FLOSSmanuals.org/news/notes-lab-designing-challenge-p2pu">http://www.FLOSSmanuals.org/news/notes-lab-designing-challenge-p2pu</a>).</p>
<h2>News from the global communities</h2>
<p>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: <a
title="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/"
href="http://fi.flossmanuals.net/internet-tietoturvan-perusteet/"
data-mce-href="http://fi.flossmanuals.net/internet-tietoturvan-perusteet/">http://fi.FLOSSmanuals.net/internet-tietoturvan-perusteet/</a>.
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.</p>
<h2>FM tips</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>To set up a Todo list:</p>
<ol>
<li>Open the edit page for your manual.</li>
<li>Click on the <strong>Todo</strong> tab above the table of
contents.</li>
<li>Click the <strong>Add a Todo</strong>button.
<p>A new Todo item is added to your manual.</p>
</li>
<li>Edit the item text and click save to keep the changes.</li>
<li>Keep adding items as necessary.</li>
<li>Once a Todo item is complete, click the red minus <strong>(-)</strong>
button at the right of a Todo item to delete it.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Digital Manual Scoping Study</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>FM's main takeaways from the discussion were:</p>
<ul>
<li>There are varying ideas of what constitutes a 'Digital Manual'
without a single agreed-upon definition.</li>
<li>Many groups could benefit from the use of FLOSS Manuals
Foundation tools and methodology.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<p>View the FMF post on the Digital Manual Scoping study: <a
title="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/"
href="http://www.flossmanuals.org/news/digital-manual-scoping-study-involving-floss-manuals"
data-mce-href="http://www.flossmanuals.org/news/digital-manual-scoping-study-involving-floss-manuals"><br>
http://www.flossmanuals.org/news/digital-manual-scoping-study-involving-floss-manuals</a>
.</p>
<p>For Mick's in depth review of the the discussion go to : <br>
<a
title="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/"
href="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/"
data-mce-href="http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/">http://clearerchannel.org/wordpress/blog/2012/07/13/digital-manual/</a><br
data-mce-bogus="1">
</p>
<h2>Editors note</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Manual Spotlight - VLC</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The manual starts off with the typical <em>"how to install
section"</em>, 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 <em>"Creating
your own audio/video streams"</em> and <em>"converting media
files from one format to another"</em>. The manual provides very
good detailed instructions for using a number of VLC's many
features.</p>
<p><strong>How you can help</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>VLC is a great software and we have a great foundation manual, it
just needs your help to bring it up to date.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Catch you next month.</p>
<p>John</p>
</body>
</html>