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Welcome to Mainstream Guides
Hi, I'm Darrell Icenogle, chief guide and bottlewasher of Mainstream Guides. The Guides are video tutorials on chosen pieces of software. The selected software is picked because it is:
- useful to a mainstream audience
- free, or very high value for the money
The idea of Mainstream Guides is that many of us would rather be shown than told how to do things on a computer. Software manuals can be great as reference to the more powerful features of a program, once you know the basics. But first you need to get the 'big idea' of the software:
- What does the software do?
- Would it be useful to me?
- Will it work on my computer?
- How do you do basic operations?
For the most part, Mainstream Guides are short and to the point, although there are some pieces of software that deserve a more extended look. More Guides will be added frequently, and you can be notified about new Guides by completing the Free Newsletter form in the right-hand column.
Please comment on the Guides and tell me how to make them better!
Darrell Icenogle
My career has taken many forms, but always revolved around adult learning -- first as an educational designer/ technologist/ administrator for the University of California, San Diego; then as the director of educational technology for the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute's School of Management and Strategic Studies.
In the two positions that followed these, at Digital Equipment Corporation and Avid Technology, I focused on technology, and on developing software user interfaces that were easy to learn. Finally, I've brought these interests together at this site, which finds good software and uses effective learning strategy to provide instruction in its use.
Just a bit of educational geekery: Many of us, when conveying information about how to do something on the computer, lose awareness of what we know that the person we're teaching doesn't know. This knowledge which is necessary to do a task, but that you don't realize you need to teach, is called tacit knowledge. That's why showing is more helpful -- more complete, actually -- than telling. That is one of the qualities of teaching via screencast that is so appealing.
