Day 5: A Different Kind of Screencast
I spent most of today creating another screencast, this one explaining what “and”, “or”, and “not” mean to programmers and how they work. There are no live examples this time: instead, I illustrated the talk with some simple images. Setting aside the question of whether Venn diagrams are the best way to explain Boolean logic, do you prefer this to live desktop of the previous screencast? Do the jumps back and forth between sets and tables make sense, or are they confusing? Do the colors add value, or should we stick to black & white? And how about the pace—is it too fast, too slow, too repetitive, et cetera?
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
Do you prefer this to live desktop of the previous screencast? — In general I preferred the live desktop, but I think there is room for some of this kind of material, in particular when the subject is conceptually challenging.
Do the jumps back and forth between sets and tables make sense, or are they confusing? — I thought this worked well.
Do the colors add value, or should we stick to black & white? — I found the colors particularly helpful in distinguishing between true and false in the tables. I think they are fine in the rest of the material and I generally prefer a little color for visual engagement, but I’d suggest keeping them consistent (e.g., the sudden appearance of green and pink in the ‘not + real’ table slide was a little jarring.
And how about the pace—is it too fast, too slow, too repetitive, et cetera? — I thought the pace in first 3:30 was too slow. Since your audience is scientists it’s fair to expect them to be smart, logical thinkers. As such 3.5 minutes to cover basic “and” and “or” is excessive. Given the audience the risk of moving to0 slowly is also not insubstantial because we don’t have a lot of time and we’re easily bored (I turned on the Red Wings – Sharks game 2 minutes into the screencast
. The pace was good in the last two minutes.
do you prefer this to live desktop of the previous screencast?
* I think that the slideshow suited this material better
Do the jumps back and forth between sets and tables make sense, or are they confusing?
*I think the colours helped bridge the two
Do the colors add value, or should we stick to black & white?
* yes colours are always good to add some visual interest to a potentially distracted audience, though I’ll echo the previous poster that the non-primary colours were jarring, though they seemed to work better when the magenta and lime(?) combined for blue
And how about the pace—is it too fast, too slow, too repetitive?
* pace is good, it’s online, so people can pause or repeat if they find it too fast, perhaps you could seek feedback and modify any screencasts that receive a lot of complaints
similar to the first article, it would be nice to see table of contents with timestamps to skip around for repeat viewers. it might cut down on the number of screenshots you have to place below