Somebody posted that?


It's a good guess that many of the tutorials, and of course not only the tutorials, that we can find on the web are far from being finished products. More often than not they're first drafts, exercises, far-from-professional attempts to explain something. They probably "explain", if that's what they do, more to the person preparing the tutorial than to a well-defined audience. They may, perhaps, not even have a well-defined audience, and instead serve primarily as thought experiments for the person who prepared them. Rather than being polished work, these are more often than not attempts by the people who've prepared them to make sense to themselves. When the not-originally-intended audience uses these tutorials chances are good that they'll learn more about the person who prepared them than about the issue being explained. Readers who chance upon these may find themselves scratching their heads and wondering why someone went to the effort to post material such as this to the web.

But even when we come across impressive and convincing material (and yes, there's lots of that available as well), we often realize just how highly contextualized real learning is. We may read or view a tutorial and remark to ourselves about how good it is, but we'll often also notice that it's not exactly what we had in mind. And why should it be? We, after all, weren't the intended audience. If we're searching for something that meets our specific needs, we might as well hope that somebody has prepared something specifically for us.



Go to: Inventing wheels in cyberspace.