Some people learn things in different ways. If reading HOWTOS was the best way to do something, why do we have WLUG meetings? I wouldn't see these as being comprehensive overviews of whatever we're trying to teach, but more like a WLUG presentation where we show the beginnings of one "cool" thing. I think this would be great for people who have heard of linux, but never tried it out before... The real newbies, the people who don't want to wade through pages and pages of documentation just to get an idea of what they need to do. Take the first video that was suggested, "What is linux and why it's good" I think a 15 minute video can show linux off more than reading about it for hours. Another person had suggested advocacy style videos, I would assume this would be "built in" to any video we made. If we make one on how to set up a small business server (mail, file sharing, dhcp, dns), then we would also mention why it's better than other solutions. Hell, maybe that video could even be used by employees to help sell management (who doesn't want to read through *any* technical documentation) on the linux idea. And yes, this is a lot of work. I wouldn't expect us to do more than one video a month. Lets take 60 for n ... 15 minute video equals 15 man-hours of work. 5 people working on it means they'll have to spend a full work day a month (I'm assuming video production is like programming where you don't scale linearly by throwing more people at it). Besides, if we do one or two, and the work to usefulness ratio is too low, we quit. -Marc -----Original Message----- From: doug waud [mailto:douglas.waud@umassmed.edu] Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 9:05 PM To: wlug@mail.wlug.org Subject: Re: [Wlug] GPL Videos ... Hi I've been listening to this thread and perhaps it is just generational disconnect but I cannot visualize what you could do with video that you could not do better with text/html/jpegs etc. Video is good if there is something to be viewed (for example, a trip to a foreign country, a beating heart in a Physiology course, the characteristic gait of a patient with Parkinson's disease, a football play etc.) But, in my experience, what you need if you are trying to learn how to do something, is usually a cookbook (this highlights a general weakness of man pages, they tend to leave out real-life examples). Furthermore, when something is textual, you and retrace easily and chose the pace. The problem now is that, if I am right, we would be competing with howtos! :-) Another problem is that, if Jeff's grandmother is like my wife (probably both about the same age), there is no way she is going to either watch a video or read a document on anything technical (This is a corollary of the advice to never give your wife a present which plugs in). So I'd like to ask those video enthusiasts out there to give a specific example of what a five/fifteen minute video might actually contain. doug PS Another hurdle I anticipate is that it usually takes n minutes to make 1 minute of good video where n is a large number :-( _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug