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Comment by thenomad | Hacker News Reader

Can't speak for everyone, but personally I absolutely hate having to trawl through audiovisual format for learning anything, and coding is particularly bad.

It's just so damn slow. I can read and absorb information about 5x faster than I can watch a video. That leads me to feel a lot like the video's just wasting my time.

On occasion I've even considered sending tutorial videos to a transcription service.

So - personally, I much prefer a textual alternative. But I know some people like video.

Given you are doing video-like things, please make sure they're as tightly edited as possible. Really tightly-edited audiovisual content is a lot more tolerable. There's very little more annoying than a two-hour-long, rambling tutorial that could have gotten to the point in 12 minutes.

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Totally agree with you, I can't stand video for knowledge acquisition, most of the time it's too slow, sometime too fast, you can't search, you can't easily refer to something later. It's quite similar to classrooms in a way, without being able to ask questions...

Try this for your next video lecture: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

You can make even the most boring/slow presenter sound peppy.

You also cannot search a video or audio. That's a huge disadvantage in my eyes: often enough, I know exactly what I am looking for, and if you don't explain the exact concept I want to learn, I don't want to sit through because I can't search or skim the text.

I'm working to combine the technologies of spectrograms and photo-reading to be able to quickly skim any audio or video. Though, by the time I'm done it will probably be trivial to just use speech recognition

I'm a co-founder at https://www.dailydrip.com and we produce 2 screencasts per week in each topic (5 minutes a day, 5 days a week, 3 times it's just text), but we always provide a full text script for the video screencasts for those that prefer just learning via text. Also: search, as mentioned.

That's marvelous, and more or less the perfect solution.

I fall in the same category. And as another commenter has replied, search is a plus for textual alternatives.

But I am sure there is a majority of learners who prefer video/audio medium ( given the vast amount of video tutorials out there ) . If anyone reading this falls in that category, why do you prefer it? Genuinely interested.

I prefer it because it moves through my linguistic centers which, for me, is good for learning. The best learning strategies activate visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.

I prefer video tutorials, but only when the instructor is aware of and takes advantage of the visual medium. It's just that the visual component of over 90% of coding videos is little more than watching someone type text into an IDE, editor, etc. Casters just often completely neglect the visual component by relegating it into static, monochromatic diagrams and flowcharts or at best a digital whiteboard. I don't need to see an instructor actually type out the code or make some barely legible scribbles. I already have the code!

Videos that effectively engage you visually are very powerful learning tools. For example, back when I was learning sorting algorithms, I was having trouble understanding merge-sort. I read about it in numerous texts, and I could implement it, but only because I had memorized the coding pattern. Then, I came across this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INHF_5RIxTE

and in an instant it all made sense. Doing it well takes time, preparation, creativity, and often times a bit of resources. The youtube series Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell does an excellent job of engaging you visually and I wish more online coding tutorials would adapt some of their techniques.

But, it's rare to find that so I when learning a new topic, I'll generally inhale a book or two on the topic.

Yes, agreed.

If I'm watching a video tutorial from someone who understands the medium and is using it to its full advantage (including understanding editing and visualisation) that's a different story.

But - speaking as a former filmmaker - I know that doing something like that is neither quick nor cheap. It's "I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one" x1000.

Generally I completely agree with you, but sometimes being forced to go slowly makes you absorb it more. It's a bit like making notes on a text as you go through it.

Hopeless for reference, though, obviously.

I feel the same. For the same reason given a new topic I start with the video tutorials and then dive into the text.

I am more of a visual learner but I completely agree about tightly-edited content. When I record video courses, I spend most of my time editing and rephrasing to make it shorter.

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