[ExI] Bandwidth of Information Gleaning

[Lee Corbin]

Now my very small company at which I have been happily employed 
for around ten years has been bought out by a giant corporation. We
still manage, despite certain new difficulties and obstacles, to support
our product for our single customer efficiently, almost as well as before.

However, the corporation requires that we take many online "classes",
which consist of multimedia presentations of (and endless varieties of)
materials, everything from "Rational Unified Processes" to classes
on Java. (If you are already a capable and intelligent software engineer,
and you don't know what RUP is, then just remain that way and consider
yourself lucky.)

Among my many beefs, I am annoyed at the manner in which the online
courses are conducted. The text is good, even the diagrams are quite
good, but the animations are silly and redundant. And quite often they're
visually distracting, as one is trying to focus on the ideas behind a
paragraph of text.

On this list recently, a link to a multimedia presentation regarding the basic
principles of an individual's self ownership, individual liberty, and respect for
private property, and so on, was suggested. It is a "Ten minute Flash Animation"
and is at

http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.html

I found it very slow paced. Now, I myself happen to be able---under
some conditions---to absorb knowledge via straightforward, old-
fashioned, outmoded, linear text. I am afraid that music and animation
for the most part add nothing to my learning. Moreover, they can in
some cases, such as in the above flash animation, actually *decrease*
knowledge acquisition and comprehension per unit of time expended.
In short, I became impatient during the ten minute presentation.

Did anyone else experience my frustration?  On the other hand, are
there testimonials as to the effectiveness of said presentation?

Lee