Ever read those children's 'Choose your own adventure' books?

If the screen-cast videos can be accessibly embedded within an ideally or well structured written post (or posts - html eg. using outline structure or perhaps fully dynamic parts of the post page), then you may cover 2 or maybe more learning styles.

I did this with partial success in writing on-screen tutorial documentation for GIS internal staff operators (Geographic Info Systems - computer mapping)
I had already given them basic introductory training and they then needed to see the immensely detailed operational processes in full.
I captured the screens of me doing each of a set of example mapping operation processes that had been carefully chosen to represent as many (multiple) work operation processes as possible.
Where necessary I split up those videos into steps.
I also wrote up the steps of each operation in summary, in text in the html page.
The steps text & video were inside dynamic html outline controls so that when they were practising the operation at the same time (on another screen), then they click that step (outline item), each step text would then form a heading for the contents of that outline items contents of a video or other simpler description text, and that whole step item & contents would open & scroll to centre and dominate the visible instruction page, and if it had needed a video for that step, the video dominate that visible part of the instruction page, and would start automatically.
Saved me an awful lot of very difficult long description in writing, which would have been far too dry for most people to read and really learn from anyway.
Jase

I would prefer posts because so I can skim them and extract the relevant informations.

(But an screencast which is not to long and points directly to the problem could be also quite well)

Thanks for your blog.
cheers

@Jase - Thanks for the comment, I would love to do something like that but I don't think I could do a whole system myself. Did you use an open system, or did you hand roll it?

@Pascal, thanks for the comment. Searching is one of the drawbacks to video. However, you get a little bit of search-ability with the chapter titles.

I did the html pages entirely by hand, with the help of only the iGoogle page's dynamic outline javascript & +- images, all credit to Google ;) (they weren't in a blog or any pre-formatted type of web page, nor commercial, rather a standalone set of internal html-based tutorial pages). The screen-casts were done in a pro. app specifically for that purpose, i forget its name just now (will dig it up). -was years ago, nowadays the html coding tools seem much better so, fully dynamic html seems easier nowadays than outline controls and superior too.

What about a mixed approach? That is, have the main content in article format, but for certain actions or steps which may be hard to explain, you could use screenshots or screencasts instead. For example, have a short screencast of about a minute showing how to make connections among objects in IB. That's something that's hard to 'get' just by reading. And by breaking it up, people who may already know how to do that can just skip the screencast and continue on.

Hi Bill,
I really appreciate your work here, and I'm glad about every post in your blog.
Personally I prefer articles over videos, but I would suggest to use the option which is the least effort for you.

@Arne - Thanks for the kind words!

@Kevin - I think that is where I'm headed, will have to try a couple of different things.

Bill, I find that I learn things best by doing. If I need to learn a new framework or platform, I come up with a targeted project and figure out what I need to to make it work. I'm also a fan of the apprenticeship system, but unfortunately neither of these methods are conducive to teaching a large audience online.

One thing I do appreciate are practical examples. My favorite parts of the WWDC talks are the demos, where abstract concepts that you've been hearing for the past few minutes are shown solving a problem or doing something cool. Seeing the real-world applications for a technique or framework is far more valuable to me than just describing its interface.

I'd suggest doing small projects, like the ones you've done for the Front Row Core Animation interface or your OBJ model loader, and taking the user through the important lessons they can learn from that functioning application. Users will have something real they can play with and pick apart.

Late addition to the comments; I'm running waay behind in my feeds.

I'd love the hybrid approach, but inverse of what Kevin advocated. I prefer the video lesson being the bulk of the educational content. I especially like mixing screencast with illustrated slides to mix actual "how-to" with concept-based ideas. Text plays a very important role, though. Like most everyone else, I skim a lot of content, so having a really good text summary of what's in the video is very important in order to (1) find it to begin with, and (2) let me know what I'm about to invest my time in.

I'm even later but I'll throw in my two cents even if it doesn't matter!

I much prefer blog articles to learn through, largely because as mentioned before, you can zero in on what you want. However - video lessons are a lot easier for me if it's on something I know nothing about, easier to follow and generally, understand. I think the worst possible type is strangely through books - I got bought this book for my birthday and for some reason I could not get my head round the explanation style.

I've found that with mnay other books, but weirdly not blogs!