I started a YouTube channel in 2021 called Thinking in public, with the intention of sharing the practices I use as part of my academic work. From the channel description:
I’m a teacher and researcher working in higher education, and I spend a significant part of my time trying to figure out how to be a more productive academic, while staying sane. I’m going to use this channel to do some thinking in public, especially around the practices and processes I use to improve my knowledge work. I’ll also post some of the presentations I’ve given as part of my formal academic work, especially where that work hasn’t been made publicly available before.
Since starting the channel, I’ve had a few colleagues ask me to include how-to-type videos as part of the content I’m creating, and I wanted to say something about why I don’t think this channel is the right venue for those kinds of tutorials.
I’m not interested in ‘building an audience’ so that I can start inserting ads into the videos, so I have almost no incentive to post regularly, other than to capture an idea that others may find useful. To say that this happens sporadically is an understatement, but if I started to feel like I need to create content for the sake of it, it’s likely that this project will end soon afterwards. And this is where the tension lies, because videos about how to use software can be beneficial when it comes to feeding the YT algorithm. If I publish a video every time an app gets updated, or I create 3 videos showing the same process with different apps, YT ‘rewards’ me for that.
But, I don’t want to get sucked into an endless rabbit-hole of creating videos about software. I don’t have the time, energy, or motivation to create a series describing how to set up working environments, or install applications and browser extensions. There are literally hundreds of videos on YT that explain those things much better than I could.
I want to focus my attention on the problems that academics face, and how I think about addressing those problems. If I get distracted by talking about how the software works, I’m not going to get very far talking about the things I actually care about.
And, next month, I may be using different software to what I mention in the video. For example, I’ve switched to Simplenote from Joplin for temporary note-taking, which I talk about briefly in this new video. Does that mean I need to make another video to demonstrate how I use Simplenote instead of Joplin? Of course not. The principle is that you need a system for taking temporary notes, and your system may be (and probably should be) different to mine. You do you.
Now, I’m obviously going to talk about software at some points in the series; I wouldn’t be able to do any of my work without it. But my intention isn’t that I go on to explain how that software needs to be set up, or what extensions you need to install in your browser. If you see me using something that isn’t well-explained in the video, you can ask in the comments. Or find an example of someone else who’s already made a video (I promise you, that video exists).
Anyway, this is a short video that goes into a bit more detail about why I’m not going to make tutorial-type videos on the channel, as well as why I use my real working environment to create the videos rather than a demo environment that isn’t real. As always, I hope that it’s useful.