“My work has been trying to promote e-learning with ted talk-like videos and I absolutely hate it. It’s not just about the speed.
I can learn so much quicker with text. I can skim through the parts I already know and spend more time on the parts I need to carefully consider. With video I need to skip around and it’s hard to keep track of what’s being discussed then.”
Text to me is like ASM for computers. It’s immediately hitting the raw levels of my brain, which makes it fast and efficient. Immediately absorbed.
“For computer stuff text is usually better than video, except maybe for how to do complex stuff in some desktop application or walk through games. But for learning how to raise a fence a video is so much better than text.”
A video can be so much better, but might be worse. Most likely, a blog post about raising a fence would probably not be great to read. But! It might also be the ultimate resource to raising a fence, if the person went through diagrams and pictures and values in tables. That would make it far more precious than a video that you know will probably disappear at some point, even if it can be so much better than text (say a beautiful, short video straight to the point, a rare feature on YouTube). But might be the worst time-consuming thing. Gambling!
In any way I think it’s much easier to skim through texts than through videos. Always will. Which is why text is better to learn, while video adds fantastic value (sometimes).