Free Culture Roadshow 2009

Watched a great presentation on a new documentation strategy for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, given by Prof. Kannan Moudgalya of IIT-Bombay. The basic concept is using peer produced “spoken tutorials,” which are essentially screencasts, to demonstrate a program function or explain a single concept for a FOSS application or framework. The project is being funded by a national initiative to raise levels of education, part of it specifically to boost learning among economically poor students. You can see examples of spoken tutorials on Prof. Moudgalya’s website: http://moudgalya.org/

Postage Stamp Example of a Spoken Tutorial for CamStudio (FOSS screen capture for Windows)

By keeping the tutorials simple and concise he envisions an easy-to-use index of video tutorials for a given app that give the learner instant access to the thing they’re interested in learning about. Furthermore, both authoring and translating the tutorials is simple enough that it could be done by an army of dedicated volunteers.

Prof. Moudgalya emphasizes the importance of low-cost solutions for this kind of distributed work. A spoken tutorial can be created on most hardware, usually only a cheap microphone will be the only extra necessity. The software he recommends for capturing the tutorial is also available cheap or free; FOSS on Linux and Windows and relatively inexpensive on Mac.

At this point, there are spoken tutorials for a handful of FOSS applications, including Scilab (a Matlab alternative). Additionally, they have created tutorials that demonstrate how to use the software to make a tutorial (there are versions for Linux, Windows, and Mac).

In addition to the low cost imperative, Prof. Moudgalya also highlighted the fact that India has a huge number of languages that are spoken. In light of this, he has created tutorials that demonstrate how to translate (via overdubbing voice on the video) using free or cheap software. This is so important that his department hosted a contest to translate the “how to re-dub tutorials” spoken tutorial into as many languages as possible. In the end, they had the video dubbed into 15 different languages and had a total of 25 submissions. Looks like there’s a contest going now to dub the Windows Movie Maker spoken tutorial.

Prof. Moudgalya has a team of students developing a social network specifically to host and encourage production of more spoken tutorials. While we didn’t get a lot of details about the network, Prof. Moudgalya assured me he’ll send an email as soon as they unveil—we will post about it here as well!