Minutes
Minutes of the interactive session with Mr. Asokan on Spoken Tutorial on 3rd June 2010
The interactive session with Mr. Asokan was held on 3rd June 2010 which was for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Approximately 15 people attended the discussion.
The interactive session started with Prof. Kannan giving a brief introduction of, how Mr. Asokan is involved in E-learning and training people who are just out of college and who are waiting to find a job.
Mr. Asokan took over the session by introducing himself. As a part of his introduction he told everyone that he is a trainer in technical areas, trains fresh graduates, trains on coding skills, generic skills, instructional designing etc. Apart from all these, he is a Consultant to many companies, conducts workshops and training programmes.
Mr. Asokan explained the right way of making Spoken Tutorial. According to him, to make a Spoken Tutorial
- Firstly, the need for making the Spoken Tutorial has to be understood. This could be done by asking oneself a question about the need to make Spoken Tutorial and answering it by using any tool available.
- Never should an attempt be made to teach everything in one Tutorial. Not more than 20% of the Topic needs to be covered. So the concept of 80% and 20% should be worked out. This means not everything about a subject should be covered in a Tutorial but just 20% of it should be covered.
- Chunking down the subject into small portions always helps it to understand better.
- Making a Spoken Tutorial which is like a “Never use Toys” is a bad idea because once the spoken tutorial is heard to, its forgotten but a spoken tutorial should be made in which you can add functions and features after functions and features and it should progress in a way that makes it a good Spoken Tutorial to teach people. Examples should be chosen which could add in more features to make the users feel that its a very convincing Spoken Tutorial because
1.It should be something useful.
2.It should be an example which has a provision to add more features and which could be worked out with more syntax than what is already there in the tutorial.
- Choose an example which is not trivial but very simple
- The Spoken Tutorial made, should teach the person to learn by himself rather than the tutorial teaching him.
- Depth of the subject should be the design coverage and not the time. The time constraint is always there for everyone, but the anticipated errors can have a separate tutorial by itself so that when the user goes through it, the errors would be anticipated while learning the software. Assumption should not be made that the user or the learner will not make errors. There could be a interactive learning session where a quiz could be given for the learners or the users, on the errors, so that when the person goes deeper into the spoken tutorial then he would anticipate the errors which could occur.
- Spoken Tutorial should be made interactive. For Example: When a tutorial is made on an arithmetic problem, the person or the user who is learning it, should pause in between to think than just do it mechanically along with the tutorial. He should be working the tutorial out when he pauses and then once he has cleared that, then go ahead with the rest of the tutorial.
The discussion was a very interesting and a fruitful one which pointed towards the key things which would be considered while making tutorials in future.
To summarize the interactive discussion of 1 hour and 15 minutes, the Spoken Tutorial team will, in future make a very convincing Spoken Tutorial based on Mr. Asokan's inputs.
Plan of Action:
- While making Spoken Tutorial, the need has to be ascertained as to why the Spoken Tutorial is made.
- Define the prerequisites of the Spoken Tutorial
- Make convincing Spoken Tutorials which would make the user learn more of such tutorials from the portal.
MINUTES OF THE PRESENTATION WHICH WAS HELD ON 28TH MAY 2010
A presentation was held on 28th May 2010 for an hour and a half. The interns from SNDT College presented on The Pedagogy approaches. Exploration of the common used Social Networking sites and application of these sites to popularise the portal www.spoken-tutorial.org was done.
Komal, Geetha, Shruti and Srilakshmi presented on the different approaches which could be used to make Spoken Tutorials. They presented templates and then the different approaches of making spoken tutorials with examples. The methods mentioned were
- Example rule method.
- Dialogue form.
- Scenario based method.
- Gagne's Nine Events
The four students, also presented how social networking site could be useful in popularising the portal www.spoken-tutorial.org. The common social networking sites were taken up and explored before hand the results were, that, in
FACEBOOK:
- The awareness of the portal could spread through the messages written on the “Walls”
- It could be spread even as a “News Feed”
- Any particular video can be uploaded in Video uploads and shared with friends on this social networking site, Photos could also be uploaded relating to the tutorials or the progress of the project.
- On “Status Updates”, expressions can be made of anything, so in a way, this expression could be used to express opinions about spoken tutorial or the project.
ORKUT:
- In Orkut, to popularize the portal www.spoken-tutorial.org, a “Community for Spoken Tutorial” could be created.
- There is a feature called “Orkut Promote” to promote the portal.
- “Testimonials” could be written by people who have used the portal and this could be a better way of telling people about the popularity.
- “Videos” could be added on this social networking site so that members and friends could see it.
- “Photos” regarding the Project could also be uploaded.
TWITTER: All the above features appear on Twitter too, but another special feature is that the URL could be made smaller by using a site http://twitter.com/TINYURL
BLOGGER.COM
- The portal could be popularised by private and public Blogs. The user has the right to give in access to whoever they want to, based on the status of private blogging and public blogging.
- Notifications could be made through which word could be spread, about the portal.
- Blogger.com has the feature to blog in various languages all over the world including a couple of Indian languages which would help the portal reach out to people who speak these vernacular languages.
Overall, a research on the popular social networking sites was good but certain things to be covered and some concerns which were raised were
- How are these social networking sites going to be of a help from the pedagogy point of view and learning point of view for the Users?
- Which of the social networking sites are applicable and match the requirements of the portal www.spoken-tutorial.org.?
- How could a comparative study on all these social networking sites be made?
Plan of action for future:
- The mentioned approaches could be applied to make Spoken tutorials in future.
- The social networking sites could be used to popularise the portal www.spoken-tutorial.org.
MINUTES OF THE MEETING WHICH WAS HELD ON 11TH May 2010
The meeting as scheduled started at 4.20 PM on 11th May 2010 in Room No. 230 in the Chemical Building of IITB, Powai, Mumbai. It was attended by approximately 33 people.
Prof. Kannan started the meeting by giving the information about
- What has been done in the portal http://spoken-tutorial.org.
- What should be done for the portal for the project to be taken to the next level.
- What was the outcome of the meeting, Prof. Kannan had had with the Parliamentary Consultative Committee.
Prof. Kannan also mentioned that the workshops will be an ongoing thing but also mentioned that the Scilab Spoken Tutorial project needs to be taken to the state of Gujarat. The plans of making Gujarat Scilab literate could be executed by educating 200 Engineers from Gujarat. They would then in turn spread the knowledge of Scilab in Gujarat. These Engineers, after getting educated would go to different colleges and educate the other keen learners in Gujarat.
The importance of running our discussions on the mailing list also was specified. Hence it was decided that all the team members and people involved with the Project would intimate, discuss and interact on the mails through the mailing list and it was also decided that in case there is something important to be discussed, then the team needs to present the issue and discuss, otherwise the team would meet once in a month for the updates to be known.
Prof. Kannan also mentioned that until the team had an acceptable solution through open source system, the team would continue to use proprietary codecs as well. Until the dub ogv files could be got directly on windows, the conversion from ogv to wmv will be made and then movie maker would be used.The screen size, file size has to be maintained and most importantly the quality in all the conversations has to be maintained. The open source enthusiasts were requested to come up with an acceptable solution at the earliest.
The meeting also lead towards the Scilab wikipage being updated. Scilab would be the model for any other Spoken Tutorial which will be made in the future.
There was a mention about the tutorials to be made in Python as well. Python Spoken Tutorials are to be made for the Level 0 learners. Once made, they would be uploaded on the portal http://spoken-tutorial.org. There was also a mention that the Python tutorials would be dubbed into Marathi.
Plan of Action:
- Marathi Latex Spoken Tutorials to be reviewed by the selected reviewers at IITB
- FOSSEE team to complete the series of Spoken Tutorials for Python Level 0
- ASCEND to be featured on the Wiki pages
- Single Board Heater System to be featured on Wiki pages
MINUTES OF THE DISCUSSION WHICH WAS HELD ON 29TH APRIL 2010 FROM 10:15 AM TO 1:10 PM.
As scheduled there was a 3 hours discussion on the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) for the Spoken Tutorial portal http://spoken-tutorial.org. The discussion was attended by approximately 20 people connected with the Project and was held in Seminar Hall, 3rd Floor KreSit Building IITB, Powai, Mumbai at 10.15 am. The discussion started with a short introductory note by Prof. Kannan about the documentation available on the wiki pages on the Spoken Tutorial portal. http://spoken-tutorial.org/wiki. The discussion in precise was about the Spoken Tutorial Processes.
- Spoken tutorial website entities
- Spoken tutorial website processes
- Desired Features for the website
- Feedback
Each of the content from the above topics was discussed in an interactive session. The audience got a better understanding about the contents of the wiki pages and what each entity, process, feature is all about. The audience was asked to contribute to the wiki page (add/modify/question) so that the processes of the Spoken Tutorial portal could be finalized and the development work of the proposed portal could begin. At the end of the presentation, the audience was given the option to clarify the doubts for which there was an interaction again.
Plan of action:
- Contributions and specifications on the wiki pages for the processes of Spoken Tutorial are to be made by everyone
- In the next meeting, a time-frame is to be set for freezing the dates and schedules for the development of the portal
