Friday, June 29, 2012

Learning through videos–Seems good

I was not an advocate of training especially video based. According to me as a developer we can learn by doing .Not the other way where we learn first and do things. Whenever I had to learn new technologies I usually google for its features and get an understanding about why that is invented and how to achieve the basic things. Then start practicing samples myself.
There are so many videos available out there and most of them are free. But I rarely see those videos because I cannot wait till the end to get what I want. The instructor will tell so many things which we already know and in between they tell something we don’t know. Most of the things they explain may not be useful in our project. So why should we spent time to hear what we know or what we don’t want? Another drawback of videos is we cannot search for particular  content or voice!!
But recently my current company provided pluralsight.com license to selected employees and I happened to be part of the group. This makes me to start seeing training videos. I selected HTML 5 videos first and completed one basic training. It changed my view about video training little bit. The main benefits I could see are as follows
  • When you go above the designation ladder your coding time will get reduced and meeting time will increase and you may not get much time to have hands on experience in each and every corner of the technology. The videos help us to understand all most all of the features of technology without doing it ourselves and of course when needed we can try it. Being a technical lead or Architect you must know all the options available in the technology before deciding something.
  • Since it is video it can be played at any time.During travelling, when you are waiting for your girl friend or while getting bored etc…
  • If you are smart you can take it parallel with your other tasks. Maximize player when you need something to be seen in the video.
This is not to promote pluralsight videos but to promote the learning through videos. There are so many videos out there in channel9 and youtube

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