I think it’s important to recognize that there are multiple learning styles and not everyone goes through the same steps or finds value in the same places.
I think this is highly project and phase dependent as well, and sometimes the most valuable resource is a resource that can explain the essence of a thing in minutes thereby allowing you to make a decision about whether or not spending more time on the subject is warranted.
That's one of the reasons why learning by reading is so powerful: Reading is an active involvement, it's an interaction.
Videos CAN deliver that, but it's a lot harder, because a video is not something I conciously need to interact with; I press play and it plays, whether my mind wanders to something else or no.
Videos can deliver repetition, but the format in which social media present them (with the next clickbait always only a small flick of the cursor way) doesn't exactly help.
IMHO, Videos can excel at explaining topics with laser focus on a small, complex topic, that is then explained in detail with multiple examples. When trying to teach broad topics reading wins out most of the time.
I generally agree with this comment. I think the things I'd highlight are:
1) Retention is not always needed. If my primary goal is to gain cursory knowledge of the top 5 frontend frameworks so I can decide which one I'll sink the necessary time into so I can retain/understand it, the short format can be fine (and highly desirable). I'll follow it up with a proper deep dive.
2) Understanding of core subjects may have already been established by decades of experience, and the video is just communicating what is possible, or the delta between Tech A and Tech B.
I think it boils down to: each format has a time and a place. I do think that trying to learn the depths of a completely new subject by watching 5 minute hyper-distilled overviews is not going to go well.
But that's not why I find these videos useful, personally.
Thank you for this comment. While I see opdahl's point and agree that these summaries do not provide the same level of understanding as working through an in-depth book, I see them as the perfect fit for me.
I am essentially paid to know a wide variety of possibilities to solve a problem and then narrow down on some of them.
One of the most helpful things for me is quick and concise introductions to a topic that give me some outlines and enough terms to google to rapid-fire through hundreds of criterias on why something could or could not be a good fit for the problem at hand.
The worst slowdowns in this process are topics for which only lengthy books/docs are available. Don't get me wrong, I need those to learn more about the topic later but they often make it hard to get an easy overview.
I think this is highly project and phase dependent as well, and sometimes the most valuable resource is a resource that can explain the essence of a thing in minutes thereby allowing you to make a decision about whether or not spending more time on the subject is warranted.