Tutorial Learning

I’ve never been a student of learning, really. I’ve spent time in school, and now that I think of it, I probably learned the most from solving problems. I never really thought of my books as “teaching” tools or even “learning” tools. I never thought of myself as talking to students, but to fellow professionals. I know some of the other people writing SW books count themselves as academics, and that’s cool. We need people who think about how we learn and how we teach. I tended to think of my stuff as “giving information”. Encyclopedia rather than text book. I know some schools have used my books as reference, which is great, although it was something I never intended, and they had some development work to do on their own. I wouldn’t know how to set up a curriculum for class room or how to structure a book to do it. I’m not an educator.

But for whatever reason, we’re a people who follow trends, and cave to the demand of the mob. So I have to think of tutorial learning. Or at the least video teaching. The book does include an introductory video for each of 39 chapters. The videos range from 3-20 minutes.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve done a couple series of video tutorials. The tutorials took 1/10 the time it would take to write a chapter on the same topic, and people who bought the video course paid 3-4x what they would pay for the book. And it contains 1/10 the information. To me, the information (or more to the point, the decision making process) is the only valuable thing I have to offer, so I don’t really get this fascination with video tutorials. I got paid a lot more for the videos for a lot less work. But the actual information density is so low.

I get it that reading is a lot of work, and it’s so much easier to copy what someone else does, but if you don’t engage your brain, you don’t actually learn anything. Figuring things out for yourself is probably the best way to learn. One of the things I try to do when I demonstrate things is to show my train of thought – my decision making process. So even if you aren’t figuring it out for yourself, you can study how I figure things out, and learn from that.

If I were to do a step-by-step video, it wouldn’t be just telling you what to do, it would be showing what I did, and maybe showing what mistakes I made, and how to figure out which method to use.

One of the things I’m contemplating is to make available videos of creating complex models, but instead of just showing the steps to create the model, to answer “why” I used this method instead of that method. “How” did I come to the decision to use Boundary instead of Loft. I would do several representative models in this way.

I followed the Rhino tutorials on how to make a duck. At the end I could model a duck. I didn’t learn much else about using the software, and I’m not sure I could make anything that didn’t look like a duck. People are so starved to be told what to do, but I don’t think the video industry has really got this one figured out yet. And I’m certain the publishing industry doesn’t.