Generally speaking, screencasts (and many other educational video formats) are a form of active entertainment disguising itself as passive entertainment.
I’ve been doing this for about three years, so everything I’m going to talk about here comes out of things I’ve learned along the way through trial and error, user feedback, and conversations with other Pluralsight authors. Pluralsight specializes in online IT pro and developer training and has a library of thousands of videos. One of the things that I do when I’m not writing code is produce training videos for a company called Pluralsight. You might learn a lot about tactics and formations and how soccer is played by sitting in front of your XBox and playing FIFA, but it doesn’t make you a better soccer player until you actually go out and use your body. You learn some interesting new fact or information that you can use in the future, you develop muscles or skills you didn’t have, you engage with a compelling story, all are results of active activities. Talking about things with other people (or writing about them) is an active activity that reinforces your own ideas on the subject (or helps you to consider new ideas). These “hard” activities are ultimately more rewarding than any kind of passive activity. Listening to some talking head on the radio is easy, but actually discussing what they were talking about with a colleague might require you to consider not only what was said, but how you feel about it, which is harder.
More active entertainment, which can describe actual physical activity but can also apply to activities that require you to actually think, is harder. Reading long blog posts is hard, playing soccer is hard, learning to ride a bike is hard. No one likes reading, right? I mean, why are you even reading this sentence instead of surfing YouTube looking at cat videos? As a culture, we often to gravitate toward passive entertainment–information flung at us without us having to do a whole lot of work in the process.
0 kommentar(er)
