Email conversation
| From | Stéphane Faroult |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | Video tutorials |
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| Date | 26 February 2009 15:54 |
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Mark,
Short version:
Would you object to a video transcription of your tutorials on
HowToCreate that would be available on a partially-free site? You
would be of course credited and paid some royalties if I manage to
make some money out of it.
Long version:
I love your tutorials on HowToCreate; but I am increasingly
persuaded that, for introductory material, video can be a better
medium, even than the "for dummies" or "Head First" formats. Besides,
videos can be captioned. My own specialty is SQL; and if you can bear
my rather crappy accent, you have samples of the type of thing I have
in mind here:
[URL]
[Site] is for me a kind of sandbox where I experiment. What I have
in mind is a website dedicated to e-training, where people could
register for free and could access the material for two hours per
month (figures are non-contractual :-)). If you want to see more, you
pay (I have thought of people registering several times, don't worry);
and my goal is to get mainly subscriptions from companies to finance
operations. I'd also like to support several languages (for the
anecdote, I have published two books with O'Reilly, the first one is
currently one of the best-selling SQL titles in China - I have my
eyes firmly set on Asia). As I told you, my Youtube videos are just
tests. I am working on an introductory SQL course. I also have a
2-day advanced SQL seminar (750+ slides ...) which I have given in
Asia with the education arm of Oracle but which I have designed with
video in mind. I intend to make something really professional,
including paying a voice-over talent for narration. My problem is
accumulating enough material to keep things rolling. I am thinking of
organizing a kind of database conference on the web (I've been for 20
years in the trade, I know many people), but I'd also like to
introduce other topics. When I see the best-selling computer books,
HTML, CSS and Javascript are for me mandatory topics. I'll throw in
some PHP, JDBC, MySQL and I believe I can have a something that
works.
Regards,
Stéphane Faroult
| From | Me |
|---|
| To | Stéphane Faroult |
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| Subject | Re: Video tutorials |
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| Date | 1 March 2009 08:00 |
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Stéphane,
> I am increasingly persuaded that, for introductory material, video
> can be a better medium
Personally, I find videos to be the most painfully difficult and
annoying medium for education. Aside from the obvious limitations of
making it impossible to copy and paste, they force people to work at the
pace of the narrator, even if they are unable to cope with that pace, or
if that pace is painfully slow for them (generally, I like to listen to
spoken content at about 4 times the speed that most narrators talk).
Different people prefer different paces, and a video cannot cope with
that. People cannot write examples and tests as they go, without
constantly switching the video on and off.
Accents make it far more difficult for non-native speakers (even
standard British English or generic American English accents are painful
for native speakers of the alternate dialects), while written text is
far more clear, and can be automatically translated when vocabulary is
limited. For a short commercial or 1 minute intro to a new graphical
tool it may work, but listening to any voice drone on for 50000 words is
more like mind-numbing torture, and not conducive to education on a
technical subject. It's also nearly impossible to skim content, locate
sections or subsections, and find linked references. Links to other
non-sequential sections are impossible. And finally, the large downloads
are debilitating on slow connections.
So no, for the majority of people it is not in any way a better medium.
For people who do want it spoken, they can use a screen reader, or a
browser with voice support, like Opera on Windows, or Opera or Safari on
Mac, to read the tutorials to them, at a speed that they can control.
But now for your request:
> Would you object to a video transcription of your tutorials on
> HowToCreate that would be available on a partially-free site?
A video version is effectively a translation, with the same problems,
limitations, and legal restrictions. The short answer is "I do not
authorise this sort of use", the long answer is here:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/aboutsite.html#saveprint
Note also the point "You may not sell copies of the pages on this site
for any reason". Selling a video copy of the tutorials is likewise
forbidden. They are not for sale.
Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/