What do you feel sucks the most when learning something new on the internet?

[rgonzalez]

Assuming you have time to learn something new. A new topic you know nothing about. Not to deepen your understanding of a topic.

And that it is by yourself, not classroom learning. That is, self-teaching. In the process of going:

From: "I want to learn X" (e.g. Spanish, Arduino, Rails, How to build a startup?, How to play guitar?) To: "This is the resource/link/blog/book I am going to use to learn"

What's your biggest frustration? What do you hate the most?

Would love to chat beyond here, DM (@rjgonzo) me if you want to chat some more later.

[hodder]

The biggest problem for me always seems to be figuring out what I need to know, rather than finding the resources themselves. For instance, assume you want to learn how to make a simple web app, and have no experience or background in programming, CS, databases, etc. Figuring out where to start and how the puzzle fits together can be really daunting.

You start googling but can't figure out how it all fits together. Javascript, Ruby, Ajax, Python, Rails, Django, Flask, MySQL, heroku, html, css, jquery, bootstrap, appengine, aws, servers, browsers, APIs??? It takes some time to figure out what things even are when you are taking your first steps. Once you realize you pretty much need to know a bit of HTML to make a website, finding a suitable tutorial, while sometimes frustrating, isn't all that hard.

Most people here know how these technologies fit together, but as a beginner I didn't. It took some (frustrating) time to learn how the puzzle pieces fit together, what is optional, what is new, what is proven... etc.

This problem isn't isolated to programming. I think this is a big problem for a ton of self directed online learning. Lets say you convince yourself you would like to become the next Satriani on Guitar, but don't know what scales, triads, or chords are let alone how they are built. Should I concentrate on technique drills, songs, improvization, theory? I have met a huge amount of people who get very intimidated and end out just learning to play songs from guitar tabs, and never progress from a very superficial beginnner level.

Perhaps it is a result of people not wanting to dive in until they can put together a basic mental model of how things work. Regardless, the "roadmap to expertise" problem seems to be real and discouraging for people not willing to just power through it. Can teachers and Tutors be relpaced in providing the direction through the weeds? I'm not sure, but surely solving this problem could be lucrative.

[rgonzalez]

Awesome feedback! And I understand, my background is on computer engineering and even sometimes when starting to learn about something completely new that I had not done before (e.g. web-services/mobile), despite my previous knowledge or background, it can be frustrating. So, how could we fix this?

What was your process to figure it out? What did you search for? Where did you search it? Did you ask someone?

[vijayr]

Agreed. I think the web has insane amount of good resources for pretty much most topics - but knowing what to learn is hard.

It would be awesome, if I can go to a site and say "this is what I want to do, now tell me what I need to learn to achieve it, and the resources needed".

[TillE]

Agreed; it's hard to figure out the right questions to ask.

What might be helpful is a place I could go to that has broad but thorough overviews of topics, where I could learn what I need to learn. Or what my options are.

[ig1]

1) Best audio/video lectures on a topic, itunes u has some great lectures, but discoverability is awful. Close to impossible to find good cotent.

2) Find what I don't know from content which mostly covers stuff I already know. Normally when I'm reading something I probably know 90% of it already, but I have to read that 90% anyway to find out what that remaining 10% is.

[rgonzalez]

1) Why is discoverability awful? How would you change/improve it?

2) So a tool/place that takes into consideration what you already know and gives you suggestions on what your next steps should be would help you on your learning process?

[ggchappell]

Material with no dates, software version numbers, etc., so that it's hard to tell whether information is obsolete or not.

Topics that are difficult to search for (D, Processing, ...).

Lack of mid-level information. (Say I want to learn to build websites. I can easily find, "HTML tags begin with '<'". I can also easily find, "Here's the bestest, coolest CSS grid." Quality tutorials at a level between these two are much rarer. Similarly, "to output in Python, use 'print'" vs. "Here's how to optimize your Django-based site." But in between ... ?)

Video tutorials for anything that doesn't involve physical action. (Give me a video to teach me how to ride a unicycle, but not how Newtonian mechanics works. How to type, yes, but not how to code.)

Video without subtitles/transcript.

Audio-only for anything at all. Ick.

[rcush]

A significant amount of what is written on the Internet seems to cater to the extremes of opinion. Therefore it can often be difficult to find something rational, well thought out and considered. This makes analysis of subjects very difficult because there is no moderate voice or that voice gets drowned out by the extremists.

A second issue is that a good many articles online that profess to be teaching something cite no sources whatsoever. As a lawyer I find it very difficult to move past that, and even if the content seems good, I'll immediately be put off using that source to learn from.

[rgonzalez]

What if every resource on the web was put to the test against a community? Rather than just existing, a community would have to sort-of approve you in order to be relevant on a certain topic?

What if that resource was somehow validated/curated by people that have used it before? Or was submitted by an expert that topic? Would you be more willing to give that resource a try?

[147]

For me, the biggest problem is going past beginner and becoming intermediate at something. It always seems like the lists of curated resources are targeted towards either beginners or advanced, never in between.

[revorad]

Not being able to ask questions one-on-one to someone who knows it, has been through it before, because in my experience, a lot of leaps in learning happen when someone explains something from a different point of view. And no, IRC is not good enough.

Finding resources used to be a problem, but it's mostly not any more. And I can't really learn anything well from just one resource. I like to drink from many wells.

[rgonzalez]

"Finding resources used to be a problem, but it's mostly not any more" Why is it not a problem any more?

How many wells usually?

[rocky1138]

Questions on forums that are responded to by the OP with "Nevermind. Got it."

Thanks for helping the rest of us with the same problem, you jackasses! :P

[devb0x]

Time, lack of time really, because man o man i can get caught up and obsessed once I'm trying to learn something new

[n2dasun]

Sounds like you're up to something similar to an idea that I've been batting around for a while. Best of luck!