By the way, Harry Clarity is a great, fun-to-watch actor. I noticed that he really seemed professional. And I like his character.

The basic idea came together from my love of film noir style, and trying to think of how I could create a narrative that would explain why someone uses Visio a lot in a variety of situations. They do it on TV all the time – David Banner turned into the Hulk every week, and Kwai Chang Caine had to unleash the Kung Fu every week in spite of his pacificist nature. They had to, or people would lose interest and stop watching.

Before Utah, we actually lived in Florida, so my kids are familiar with beaches. Lines weren’t that long at Disneyworld, and they did enjoy it.

Back to adult versus child learning, I agree that adults are much more self-directed in selecting what they want to learn.

Maybe my compromise will be to keep the videos short (under a minute if possible), remembering that it’s a somewhat passive learning activity.

I do sometimes get frustrated with the whole let-me-try videos, or quizzing. Those techniques can be annoying.

However, when I was learning Visio, I watched a bunch of videos, and one of the most useful things was a homework-type assignment at the end of each video. Here’s a link that.

There’s another practical example of child-led learning; “Blue’s Clues”. Blue’s Clues was the first public television program to do the whole “what do you think” long pause thing. It tries (among other techniques) to give children an opportunity to engage. Even if the child doesn’t ‘vocalize’ the response, their studies have shown that the pause causes children to try and answer the question. This is good, because the child (especially with a video) doesn’t know what they’re going to learn. They tune in because there’s something new to discover.

You didn’t mention whether your children had been to a Disneyland theme park before (although my hunch is they’ve been to Lagoon), but my guess is that they’ve never been to a white sandy beach. They wanted something completely new. You, on the other hand, have probably been to a beach and know what to expect.

Children excel in child-led learning environments (Montessori is a good example) because they are essentially sponges and are trying desperately to build a huge index of context and knowledge that we take for granted as adults (because we were child/sponges once too, but are under the effects of “the curse of knowledge”).

The problem is, this “user-led” learning method technically falls apart with adults when used inside of a video. Andragogy states there are some basic premises that should be considered when teaching adults. One thing to consider is that adults are self-directed in their learning, sometimes to a fault. We act more like spoiled children when it comes to learning something (i.e. “I know what I want, so give it to me now!”) So, it’s not so much that a video must be user-led as much as it should be user-desirable.

Here’s a nice little chart talking about andragogy vs pedagogy:

http://screencast.com/t/ZjAxOWRhMjEt

Now, what happens with branching and mid-video quizzes with adults is they get frustrated. They want information, not teaching/testing (ironic?). They already made the choice to watch the video, so they don’t want to be graded; getting the job done is the grade. They’re already become “user-led” before the video started. So, although engagement is important and story telling helps improve retention, taking assessment of an adult learner during encoding (receiving of the information) can be distracting.

So, how’s that for reading between the lines? Did I get any of my assumptions right?

Video tutorials are becoming increasingly important these days.

I had a chance to work on some tutorials/demos in my project and since it was related to a networking workflow, the length of the video was around 8-10 minutes. We used the TOC option available in Camtasia and inserted a few markers which allowed the user to navigate within the diffent sections of the video.

~Sujith