General > General Technical Chat
Are we becoming old, cranky scrooges in these forums.
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 28, 2020, 05:19:59 am ---I have no idea who Keith Appleton is, but AvE is hardly an example of good concise information.
--- End quote ---
My entire point is that trying to convey too much information via a video is futile! The bulk should be in some random-access medium, and the few key points, insights, experiences, or other stuff that maybe gets lost in the sea in the random-access medium, highlighted in a video.
Putting all the necessary points into a video makes for a bad video. Good videos are stories, logs, key insights, et cetera.
I like your videos. You yourself very often mention "but that's for another time" because you are fully aware of how little complex, dense information you can put in a video and still keep it watchable. You often highlight the things people get wrong, because they do not truly understand the subject. That is excellent, and your videos are important.
Keith Appleton runs mainsteam.co.uk, and makes videos about miniature steam engines, typically less than ten minutes long. He doesn't curse, but grumbles about idiotic comments and keeps a (plastic) skeleton in his acid bath (actually just descaler). He calls his videos tutorials, but they are closer to something like examples and highlights, that are useful for other hobbyists learning machining or making miniature steam engines on their own. If you look for his videos for machining tutorials, you'll be mislead, because as he himself says, he is a musician with a calibrated eye, not an engineer. But for working with or machining miniature steam engines, they contain practical experience that you just can't read from a book. It is like shop talk with a seasoned greybeard.
What I call a tutorial is a complete package of information encapsulating the basics of some subject.
I seriously dislike the idea of pointing people to only Youtube videos for tutorials, because all the necessary information is not there.
As I've mentioned, there is a lot of videos that support those learning some thing, subject or art. But as the sole (or even main) source of information, they are insufficient. If you put all relevant and necessary information in it, it will be dull and/or too long. Humans cannot acquire new knowledge very efficiently that way.
The reason I keep :horse: is not that I want the final word on this. It is because the amount of information available to us is orders of magnitude larger than any human can acquire in their lifetime, and it is increasingly important to help others learn efficiently and sufficiently, instead of just enough to fake it. Pointing others to a good Youtube video explaining the typical misconceptions or traps for young players is excellent, but such videos alone do not suffice as the key source of information.
The real trap here is related to the Dunning-Kruger effect: when you watch those videos where the "uninteresting details" and background information are omitted, one easily starts to believe they know the subject.
In the past before the Internet, people were more aware of the difference between "book knowledge" and "practical knowledge". (Though, a lot of people believed that if they read a book on something, they knew that subject.) Nowadays, "TV knowledge" is even worse, and very, very common. People see something on TV or Youtube, and they believe they know the subject. Here in Finland, you don't have Miranda rights, or a right to a phone call when arrested, yet those are exactly what the crimiyoungsters always shout about, because they've seen it on TV so it must be true... I'd hate a version of that to happen with technical information and Youtube too. :scared:
floobydust:
I still don't think much of youtube beyond entertainment.
youtube doesn't vet or check credentials, so you have tons of non-qualified people giving instructions and explanations. Medical advice, unsafe advice etc.
If video educating truly was effective, it would obsolete the classroom and lectures. We'll see this fall, as there may be no school this september due to coronavirus. Imagine paying to go to university but you're at home watching lectures. If you had more money, you could buy the Harvard or Princeton engineering lectures and be really smart. Uni's are worried about enrollment this fall session because people want to go to school and not watch TV.
james_s:
--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 28, 2020, 07:39:26 am ---Another example from one of my videos, my most popular one, the opamps basics video, 50min long.
The number of people who have contacted me thanking me for the video and how they now understand opamps better than any teacher or textbook ever taught them has been incalculable.
Sure, it's not every for everyone, but for countless people (possibly 1M+ people) it's been what they wanted and they learned something.
--- End quote ---
That's one in particular that comes to mind. I'd used op-amps successfully for years before seeing that video, but everything was a lot clearer afterward.
james_s:
--- Quote from: floobydust on May 29, 2020, 02:10:31 am ---If video educating truly was effective, it would obsolete the classroom and lectures. We'll see this fall, as there may be no school this september due to coronavirus. Imagine paying to go to university but you're at home watching lectures. If you had more money, you could buy the Harvard or Princeton engineering lectures and be really smart. Uni's are worried about enrollment this fall session because people want to go to school and not watch TV.
--- End quote ---
Bullshit. Cars are effective for transportation but they have not obsoleted bicycles or buses. Apartments are perfectly suitable for living in but they have not obsoleted houses.
The fact that something is not a 100% be-all replacement for something doesn't mean it's not effective or lacks value. Getting a complete education from nothing but youtube videos is likely to be challenging under the most ideal of circumstances, but that doesn't mean they are not an effective teaching medium.
EEVblog:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on May 29, 2020, 12:40:18 am ---
--- Quote from: EEVblog on May 28, 2020, 05:19:59 am ---I have no idea who Keith Appleton is, but AvE is hardly an example of good concise information.
--- End quote ---
My entire point is that trying to convey too much information via a video is futile! The bulk should be in some random-access medium, and the few key points, insights, experiences, or other stuff that maybe gets lost in the sea in the random-access medium, highlighted in a video.
Putting all the necessary points into a video makes for a bad video. Good videos are stories, logs, key insights, et cetera.
--- End quote ---
You can't just make an absolute claim that a "good" educational video is blah blah. People learn in different ways.
Just like there is no one perfect electronics text book, what works for one person does not work for another. Videos are no different.
--- Quote ---I'd hate a version of that to happen with technical information and Youtube too. :scared:
--- End quote ---
There is a way to help fix that, make your own content. Send us a link when you have your first video up. Seriously.
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