Quote:Original post by Talroth
There are some things that just seem so much faster to understand when a human voice explains them.

A good lecturer knows how to effectively explain the subject. Whether it's written or spoken is secondary. Their personal expertise in the subject is commonly of secondary importance. There are many experts who couldn't lecture to save their life yet can solve any problem themselves.

As far as retention goes, people remember some 60% (according to some stats I recall) of what they do themselves and only about 20% of learning via other means.

And video tutorials make it really hard to do something alongside. University courses are split into lab work and lectures for this very reason.

Quote:Original post by Antheus

Quote:Original post by FableFox
as for tutorials, it seems that with the increasing speed of the internet, - and youtube - a lot of tutorials have move to the video type. at least as far as engine, graphics, music goes.

Which means they are completely useless to anyone who actually needs or tries to get something done.

Recently I encountered this. I really looked forward to it.

Except it's utterly useless. I don't have 30 hours to watch videos. And after I do - what then? I can't bookmark, annotate, store, link, ... I can't search, skim, copy paste, print out, read while waiting somewhere...

Video hands-on tutorials have their place, but as far as their value goes, they can only ever address the most basic of mechanical tasks. They offer no insight - they are about watching people type and click, which is one of most tedious and undesirable presentation methods in existence.

Any non-trivial topic is not about emulating the typing and clicking.

I dunno. There's a lot of video tutorials that are a lot faster to watch than to read their textual equivalent. They also tend to have a lot of extra information that's ignored in text tutorials. Little tips and tricks that might not be mentioned in text tutorials are often included in video tutorials.

I also am much more an auditory/visual learner, so watching somebody do it helps me take it up a lot faster.

I think if somebody made a better video player specifically for tutorials than just youtube videos, it could make huge headway on textual tutorials.

Yeah, video tutorials has it's place. As a graphic student, video tutorials help a lot. gnomon, lynda, digital tutors, etc. for me this is a plus compared to old book. these are places where a picture worth thousand words hold true.

but as they say, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. When video tutorials are used to teach programming - I think this is bad. However, video are good to explain things. Certain training dvd does use this method, AFAIK. Mostly text based but for things that can be explain better with a video (showing diagram and whatnot) they have a video button that shows you things, explanation, result, etc. For example they can use text to show how to code array, but video on how array actualy works - you know, like a science documentary, such as how airplane works.

What sad is that videos are used start to finish to teach programming, and I think thats' sad.

So I agree with Talroth & Antheus.

My 2 cent.

While I've always gotten my questions answered here, www.stackexchange.com is a great alternative for asking questions.

EDIT: Woops..someone already posted this. I need sleep.

Quote:Original post by Antheus

Quote:Original post by Talroth
There are some things that just seem so much faster to understand when a human voice explains them.

A good lecturer knows how to effectively explain the subject. Whether it's written or spoken is secondary. Their personal expertise in the subject is commonly of secondary importance. There are many experts who couldn't lecture to save their life yet can solve any problem themselves.

As far as retention goes, people remember some 60% (according to some stats I recall) of what they do themselves and only about 20% of learning via other means.

And video tutorials make it really hard to do something alongside. University courses are split into lab work and lectures for this very reason.

I would agree it is so in your classical classroom environment, but mostly not in the case of tutorials that people seek out themselves. If you look up and watch a tutorial/video on your own, you are much more likely to devote dramatically more attention to it and hence also dramatically increase retention.

Overall I agree with your points, though - the ability to skim is an important one and it can be very frustrating trying to locate the precise place to re-analyze a single sentence or thought.

I personally enjoy a quality video tutorial, but only if a text version of it is supplied and if the subject is visual. Otherwise it's always a hit or miss situation - you can never be sure about the pace, how boring it is and how much you can skip forward.