Monday, October 1

Wikivid (Free Software Tutorials!)

WHAT?
Wikivid is an encyclopedia of informative videos. Each content page is made up of links to free videos laid out as a video-course for anyone to watch and learn. Each page can be edited and moderated by anyone.

MISSION?
The goal of each entry is to provide access to videos on the given subject for purposes of education. The vision for Wikivid is to eventually provide its own content through video uploads from the community, however, content may also be provided via links to free videos from around the web. Wikivid is currently in Alpha, and during this test stage, content will be limited to Software-related entries only.

JUICE?
If you are eager to learn how to use widely used commercial/freeware/open source software (learning tools!), this resource might just be your next goldmine for the coming days and weeks. Here is a small selection of learning tools with tutorials from Wikivid that might get you excited (I mean drooling!):

REFLECTION TIME!
Instead of us Googling for hours through billions of web pages looking for useful and relevant software tutorials (that we might never find!); they have already been captured and organized in an intuitive way at Wikivid. Since each page in Wikivid can be edited and moderated by anyone, we are also welcome to submit video tutorial links that they might not have discovered yet. What a great project!

Coming to think of it, Wikivid can save organizations from wasting tons of money to train their staff to use different types of software (at least for those available!). Though, I suppose we still need some form of expertise to ask questions and find answers (e.g. expert, support community, searchable FAQs), and deal with specific issues that the videos might not discuss. So, networking software tutorial videos to experts or support communities would add even more spice to this wonderful software tutorials repository. Interestingly, if they manage to live up to their goal or mission, we will also have access to videos in other educational areas, too.

Wikivid is powered by MediaWiki, which is a free software wiki package. So, if you are also interested in creating your own little wiki repository it would not require much investment (At least for the software!).

Overall, Wikivid is a wonderful resource to begin our journey exploring for relevant software tutorials :)

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