Msg: 2330 *Conference*
04-11-92 01:07:49
From: LEX JENKINS
To : RICHARD HANSON
Subj: REPLY TO MSG #2314 (EDUCATION?)
Rick, Sounds terrific. Most of us learn and retain more through visual media; I know I do. Much as I admire good writing, it serves best as a complement to good illustrations, in many forms. I've learned MS-DOS through interactive CD video. I've learned tricky guitar licks that had eluded me for years by watching videos of Stevie Ray Vaughn. On a more mundane level, but more to the point, are manuals for software. While Lucid, for example, is a somewhat more powerful and flexible program than Multiplan, Multiplan's documentation is superior because it is more visual, using illustrations accompanied by pertinent and relatively brief text, with lots of "white space". It's a shame PCSG didn't pay more attention to the mundane stuff, because they had a good product. Another example: although the manual for extRAM could be better organized and illustrated, it was illustrated well (albeit with dot matrix graphics) where it was crucial - installation! The diagrams make it very clear what could have been a tricky installation if there had been no diagrams.