Training Videos (WAS: Lowering the participation barrier for Fedora Docs)

[Eric H. Christensen]

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On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 05:59:38PM -0500, Christopher Antila wrote:
> On 18 November 2013 15:05:43 Eric H. Christensen wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 10:48:21AM -0500, Zachary Oglesby wrote:
> > > ... The training at FUDCon was a great idea,
> > > but that obviously will not scale.
> > 
> > Yeah, it won't scale *but* I'm hoping to do some training videos that will
> > introduce people to the core tools and what's happening so they can
> > understand how things should work.  Videos *can* scale but only if they are
> > short and easy to understand.
> 
> I'm certainly in favour of "how-to" videos, but they have many limitations. We 
> should consider the plight of those for whom watching or understanding audio-
> visual content over the Web is impractical. You'd probably agree that training 
> videos would only be part of a multi-faceted approach. In fact, you would 
> probably agree that "additional training" is itself only part of a multi-
> faceted approach to helping new contributors. One big advantage of these 
> videos is that you'll be able to produce them very quickly, and that they'll 
> be a big help for contributors who wish to involve themselves with our current 
> processes.

Agreed that videos aren't the complete solution.  It will need to be part of a training program.  My thought on this is that because we lack personal hand-holding it's difficult for people to obtain the skills needed to be successful.  We're trying to teach people how to code without having them in front of us.  We have no textbooks, no virtual classes to watch, and a willing community that isn't being leveraged to answer questions.

> At the same time, we should take advantage of the general climate of 
> productive change to consider medium- and long-term strategies to improve our 
> processes and the documents we produce. The fact there are so many subscribers 
> to the Docs list who don't regularly participate (like myself), and so many 
> potential contributors who introduce themselves but never contribute, suggests 
> there is a problem. But what is the problem?

Perhaps we should ask?

- --Eric

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Eric "Sparks" Christensen
Fedora Project

sparks at fedoraproject.org - sparks at redhat.com
097C 82C3 52DF C64A 50C2  E3A3 8076 ABDE 024B B3D1
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