If you want to learn something quickly - use as many of your senses as possible. Videos are great becasue you can listen and look at the sound, images and text.
YouTube offers anybody the opportunity to teach, share, discover and learn by offering free videos that can be embedded on other sites.
Common Craft is a company that makes very unique and informative videos – also available on YouTube. Find out about two people (and a dog?) who are working to help you understand in simple English.
Common Craft’s Story
You really have to read their Story on the Common Craft site.
We sat giggle-distance from each other at the company. We both attended a company event in Las Vegas and came home a couple.
I started by standing in front of the camera with a whiteboard behind me, but felt like a complete dork. Then Sachi had the idea of pointing the camera straight down onto a whiteboard on the floor and using hands, markers and paper cut-outs to tell a story.
Paperworks was born in February of 2007.
We published our first video, RSS in Plain English, on April 23rd, 2007. The next day it appeared on the front page of Digg and gained 10s of thousands of views.
It is a short and quick read – a modern-day fairy tale - of how a man, a woman and a dog can find happiness, freedom, fame and fortune courtesy of the internet.
This couple makes 3 minute videos out of paper cutouts of simple drawings with time lapsed shots and narrative to explain complex topics in simple terms – in ‘Simple English‘.
Learning the Basics of the Internet and How Web Applications and Social Stuff Can Help
I have selected some of their videos and embedded them here for your viewing pleasure.
Visit their site or YouTube channel page for more.
You can also embed any of their YouTube videos onto your own site to explain anything from Zombies to Insurance :-)
List of videos in Plain English
Social Networking in Plain English
Social Media in Plain English
RSS in Plain English
Blogs in Plain English
Wikis in Plain English
Zombies in Plain English
You have to watch this one – just for the fun of it!
