Jaffa | # 11 | 2009-05-02, 15:50 | Report

And, for the billionth time, no-one is suggesting that Maemo School shouldn't look like downloads!

All you are doing with this confrontation over the technical details is dissuading many of the people with the skills to help you deliver your requirements quickly from helping you. Hell, if you'd done as I suggested, and concentrated on coming to a consensus on your functional requirements, the first version could have been up and running this weekend. In a few hours.

• Because it's geared towards downloading applications, not embedding videos.
• Because there's none of the workflow - nor the scope for it - that you want to ensure high quality tutorials which are well categorised.
• Because it doesn't meet the desire that other people have that there's the option of a plain text transcription of the video, improvable and correctable by anyone (including its hiding if it's rubbish and written for the wrong level of user).
• Because it's a midgard module and the number of people able to, or willing to, write or amend another is very very small.

We can make the wiki look like however you want: it's just images, layout and feeds. We can put any arbitrary HTML we like in the wiki, we can pull in RSS feeds and process them.

Quality control can be done by you, or a team, monitoring what gets put in "Category:Maemo School". If all the info for the index page is being sourced from a YouTube channel you control, doesn't that mean you completely control what appears? (I don't believe anyone can post a video to your YouTube channel).

If you're worried about people having to navigate through maemo.org to "Community" and then "Wiki", and then the wiki to a page labelled in little letters "Maemo School", then no-one is suggesting that either!

I think Maemo School is a fantastic idea. I think have good quality videos/screencasts is wonderful (although I like having the option of people transcribing them for those without the time/ability to watch a whole video - and to scan it to see if it delivers what they're trying to do). I think having a committed team of people ensuring the quality remains high is spot on.

I also think it'd be accessed by adding a "School" entry alongside "Intro", "Downloads", "Community", "Development", "News" and "Talk"; no matter what technology enables it.

Downloads works and looks great for downloads. It's a great source of inspiration for the site you want. But it doesn't "work" for your use-case, as I outline above.

krisse | # 12 | 2009-05-02, 16:52 | Report

This is all academic as I'll do the site elsewhere, but...


1. It currently handles downloads, but the same format would IMHO be just as suitable for tutorials.

2. I don't know what you mean by "there's none of the workflow". Do you mean people wouldn't be able to publish instantly? Of course they wouldn't, that's the point.

3. I do not want to open up tutorials to be edited by all-comers. All-comers can submit stuff, but they should not be able to publish.

4. All I'm asking is the current module to be cloned and VERY small changes to be made (really just renaming the categories and replacing some of the page titles). If even that's not possible then forget I even mentioned the downloads option.


...but all viewers should be able to edit it?

If so, I'm not getting involved. I will not take part in a beginner's guide that allows everyone to edit, because that will almost certainly make the content unsuitable for beginners.

It's not just a problem of incompetent contributors, but disagreements between competent contributors over what is suitable for beginners and what isn't. Remember all those disagreements on ITT and across the Linux community about the ease of using command lines for example? Imagine stuff like that going on all the time...

Every group-driven process I've been involved in here on maemo.org has descended into bitter spats over nothing, usually because people have different ideas about what is acceptable to end users without technical knowledge. I'd expect them to continue if a beginner's guide had editing open to everyone.

I know some people would like wikis to take over from tightly-edited publications, but in the case of tutorials aimed at technophobes wikis are not a good way of doing things.

qgil | # 13 | 2009-05-03, 05:55 | Report

Fully agree.

In the past Krisse came up alone with Tablet School and everybody gratulate her. Now she tries to evolve that project (that was video centric sinc the beginning) within maemo.org and she is facing this stop energy from people that (perhaps I'm wrong) won't be there creating videos themselves.

Krisse won the trust with Tablet School, why not let her drive whatever she thinks is best with tablet.maemo.org? The alternative is she creating a school somewhere else.

About using the schema of Downlads yes makes sense in the mid run, but before you need around 20 videos in place. Otherwise a simple list will do.

My suggestion: start creating videos with CC license allowing modifications and brand them with maemo.org only at the beginning/end. This way they can stay the way they are or someone can come up with the modifications s/he likes. Once they are unmanageable in a single list then go for mor complex formats.

But wait... in order to start you need Maemo 5 final. And perhaps even Maemo 5 users... Nothing of this exists yet. So aren't you perhaps arguing too soon?

KristianW | # 14 | 2009-05-04, 02:56 | Report

It takes a lot of skill and experience to make a good beginners tutorial.
( Just remember all those user manuals you have sworn over...)

Krisse is certainly right,
some topics, especially for beginners, are better taught by video than by text,
and it takes some time to learn to make a good video.
(I don't mean technically, but e.g. in the timing of events.)

Of course,
in some cases explaining texts are needed even if there is a good video.

Krisse is right,
a collection of beginners tutorials (whether text or video) need to be supervised and organised by someone/people with teaching experience.
And beginners should not have to search inside a wiki of more advanced and hardly understood information.

Now, should maemo.org include some tablet schooling ?
I think it should.
It would, I think, be a good investment for the start of a future growth of developing manpower.

My vote: Yes!

TrueJournals | # 15 | 2009-05-04, 03:35 | Report

I think this is a great idea, but from reading this thread, I don't see why the wiki is a problem.

• Permissions could be changed to only allow certain people to edit
• The main "Maemo school" page could be linked to anywhere
• Adding new videos is as simple as adding a page
• The "discussion" pages in the wiki would allow for giving feedback on videos/asking questions

Having dealt with adding an application to the downloads section, I really don't think it's what you're looking for. It is very specific to downloading applications for a certain platform. Tweaking would need to be done, which makes the wiki the easier option.

I think starting with the wiki would be a good idea, as it is very simple to implement. If the time comes that the wiki gets hard to manage, the videos could be moved over to a different backend in the future.

TA-t3 | # 16 | 2009-05-04, 10:40 | Report

I agree with what qgil said above. All of us are just talking the talk, but Krisse was the one who actually did the TabletSchool and got it right. Let her set it up the way she wants it. She's proved that she gets it right, several times over.

anidel | # 17 | 2009-05-04, 13:16 | Report

I strongly think that Tablet School should be part of maemo.org and have the very same look and feel.

UPDATE: well forget what's written here, it's only a series of video that will be put online, no transcripts. I'll first bried myself on the issue, then I'll write again
==================

It'll be a list of pages with videos and text transcriptions as usual. I also don't see (of haven't read carefully enough all the thread) why a series of Wiki pages won't do the job. As far as I see them, they're tabula rasa pages where one can put and organize the stuff the way she wants.
There would be, I assume, a front page (tablet.maemo.org, I think, right?) linsting and linking to all the video tutorial pages each of them with they own format, but same look&feel.

What am I missing ?

Perhaps this would need a lot of manual work from Krisse, as she would need to manually modify the wiki page (the front one) as soon as a new video is ready and, as quim suggested, this list can get difficult to handle when there will be more videos coming.

I don't know how the "Downloads" page works, but can this new "wiki front page" be automatically re-created/updated with new videos automatically somehow, of course with ease ?
Can, at least, Krisse create her own pages with Maemo.org style and have a link from tablet.maemo.org pointing there?

What's the difficulty of adapting the "Downloads" pages to better handle video tutorial pages?

Plenty of questions but I'd like to get an idea of the work involved in all the options to make this happen.

Aniello

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Last edited by anidel; 2009-05-04 at 13:19.

pigling | # 18 | 2009-05-05, 09:25 | Report

To me, the school is more intuitive for new users. I begin to flash my N810 first time following the instruction in the tablet school. There are videos tell you how to find the correct buttons in the home page, and then which next button, ..., and so on. But after understanding how to basically use the tablet, I try other new ideas such as partitioning memory card and adding new OS alternatives following wiki and threads in forum. However, I will still prefer to vivid video tutorials for these issues if there are so.

So if possible, may we provide some vivid animation or video tutorials for those first-time-user as tablet school does? I think some links to Youtube pages may be even enough.

This is my two cents option. Thanks.

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Last edited by pigling; 2009-05-05 at 09:29.

pigling | # 19 | 2009-05-05, 10:16 | Report

ohhh, now I am more concerned why the tablet school was closed!?
I admit wiki is good but how many people are really spending some time to write an easy-to-follow context-based guide in wiki. Sometimes I was just linked to some thread in forum by wiki. Also I don't think a causal user with less Linux experience can have much patience to go through the full page text description. Then the only end-up is to resell the useless toy to someone else. (I just bought mine from someone not interested in Linux. He only treated it as another difficult-to-use mixer of mp3/pda).

To Krisse,
I really like the tablet school idea facing to newbies. You don't need to concern whether it should bound to meamo.org since most of us here are not first-time users. So you should resume the school so that other newbies can find intuitive and vivid tutorials. After understanding how to basically use it, they can find here by Google if they want to try some complicated ideas, just like me. DIFFERENT GUIDES IN DIFFERENT STAGES.

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Last edited by pigling; 2009-05-05 at 10:22.

twaelti | # 20 | 2009-05-05, 15:08 | Report

I want tutorials (Video and Web and/or PDF) , but also something like "toptwenty", a set of best-things-you-can-do with a NIT. Kind of "pearl"-specific tutorials.
I also believe that making content for some apps more readily available might help, too (Creative Commons stuff etc). I really like e.g. how Canola comes prepopulated or how the NITS include some images and music out of the box. This principle shoudl be extended, at least for content-related "pearls" or similar.