If you have been into teaching you would realize that there are different kinds of learners. Some prefer verbal material, others prefer more visual, while some others like written material. The vast majority however prefer a combination of the above.
While you can pour over tutorials on how to use Emacs; just watching a video of a power user using Emacs gives you a different impression. It is really a completely different experience.
Sometimes it is faster to produce a set of video tutorials than to prepare well-written documentation. Hence they make a call. However, I agree that written documentation is the best medium for long term (i.e. smaller, searchable etc)
So, rather than asking for one medium of instruction to stop, I would rather encourage the plurality. Let the end-user pick and choose whatever he/she likes.
I personally don't like video tutorials. I rarely watch them. We don't have one on our site either. But many of our members have been asking us for one.
Our site also features video tutorials of other websites, and interestingly, I've heard many of our members cite these video tutorials as a major attraction of our site. They like that they can see essentially video demonstrations and tutorials of a website.
patio11's podcasts are great. He provides both the audio file and also the text transcript. If you read the transcript, he adds notes and context with in brackets.
We need more of this. Podcasts and videos don't work well for me at all and there are far too few transcripts around. The notes and context is going above and beyond right now but it really should be the norm as well.
His podcasts with the transcripts are great. A transcript should be the expectation for every well produced podcast. It not only helps those who prefer text and those who would prefer to skim the content, it aids those who aren't watching their native tongue to understand and gain from material. On the other hand, a transcript of a great discussion misses much of the inflection and some of the context that we get from listening.
Patio11 links a service that crowd-sources the translations, while the cost may be high for a beginning blogger it is peanuts for a startup or a high traffic site.
In one of my better elementary school science projects (not saying much, the rest were awful) I tried to compare auditory and visual learning in memorizing sets of numbers. The only result I remembered was that I learned better from reading the numbers on the page and that my siblings were different.
While you can pour over tutorials on how to use Emacs; just watching a video of a power user using Emacs gives you a different impression. It is really a completely different experience.
Sometimes it is faster to produce a set of video tutorials than to prepare well-written documentation. Hence they make a call. However, I agree that written documentation is the best medium for long term (i.e. smaller, searchable etc)
So, rather than asking for one medium of instruction to stop, I would rather encourage the plurality. Let the end-user pick and choose whatever he/she likes.