s it bad to force peoples to learn?

well i kind of apologize, most of the comments i do on these forum sections are usually a bit agressive, it is mainly because i see a lot of persons asking for "idiot guide to:" for everything, i am a firm believer that 90% of the act of creation is not possible to learn with a manual, i also believe that a lot of peoples are totally unable to do such creation but believe it id just a matter of knowing.

I learned almost everything i know myself, the hard way and only a few things from word of mouth,basically i would prefere to show to someone how to fish rather than fish for them. A lot of questions posted here could be answered with a google search.

In a way i can understand impatience to get a problem solved, on the other side i find it a little insulting that some peoples just expect to get the knowledge spoonfed to them.

So am i right?,
wrong?,
too harsh?,
not enough?

I feel this way sometimes. Like, all the 3D graphics (modeling, animation, texturing, and programming) knowledge I have I learned on my own. That said, I can understand how some people can't get over the energy barrier of a little initial learning without someone holding their hand, and that's why I'm getting into teaching this stuff.

That all said, a large part of why I wrote my previewer is because a lot of texturing questions are obviated once you can just see the texture on a model. Like, you no longer have to ask how to use the templates, because you just paint a line and see what happens.

I think design questions to SL specific items are of course okay, because I've had a few myself...LOL.

However, questions specific to Photoshop for example, can get irksome (especially when I've noticed the same questions over and over by reading the boards the last week or so). I paid (and still paying) good money to go to college and spend 9 months in photoshop and illustrator classes. If you cannot afford to do that, at least go buy a beginners guide to Photoshop, or look into some of the free tutorials on the web. The books we used in class were from the JumpStart series (this was a few years ago)... very easy and informative books for the beginner, or for those brushing up on their skills. Making an Alpha Channel is a pretty basic skill, but you have to know how other basic things work, like masking and selections to understand the concept of Alpha Channels.

But then Johan, my question on making straps look good prompted you to make that AWESOME viewer that I cannot thank you enough for making.

Oh yeah, this is my main gripe about when people ask questions. Rather than start small and learn as they go, they immediately just jump in with an advanced question that is too big to answer. Believe me though, it's not nearly as bad here as with some other forums I've frequented. At least here the question is targetted at how to texture; I've been places where people will routinely ask, as their very first post on the forum, how to make Doom/Everquest/whatever is the big game everyone's playing.

I remember the first assignment I had in class. We had to re-create a landscape from a photo using only our selection tool, solid colors, burn and dodge. It took me 20 hours to do on a 600 x 600, 300 dpi file. And darn if it didn't turn out great! LOL

http://www.tkmay.net/images/mountain.jpg This is my first project ever done in Photoshop. I used the select tool to create the area for color. I used probably less than 10 colors. Then shaded and highlighted (using different brushes). That it, just those 4 tools. (Yes, I know, the sky sucks..LOL).

You can't try to make clothing, textures and other stuff if you don't have at least the basic knowledge of how the program works. Over the last few weeks learning how to make clothing in SL, I read all the tutorials, read the message boards and found all the information I could read and look at. The only question I had was about making straps look good, but that's because I didn't really understand how the 2D texture renders on a 3D model. But now that I know that I can't really control it 100%, my perfectionist personality has been put to the wayside.

I don't know anything about 3D modeling and will probably never dive into that. But if I do, I'll be coming to you Johan for answers...LOL.

If you are offering the assistance it is at the grace of your patience.

That said, it's really nice to be easygoing.

The only times that I get torqued are when "help me understand this" questions are really just a cover for "do this for me, right now"... not so rare as I would wish.


My main character (not Desmond) is a broke, landless bum that wanders around void sims, talks to random folk and tries to be helpful when in a good mood.

It's amazing how different he is treated, compared to Desmond. Most people are very dismissive of his business ideas too *grin* but occasionally you find some real gems.

I try to use my helpfulness as a random act of kindness, though sometimes Kyrah it's not always seen as such.

I think, to a large extent it depends...

Having asked a question yesterday that might fall into "stupid questions" category, perhaps I'm not the right person to answer this though! In my defence I'd worked through the web searches, searched this forum, used PS's help and couldn't find the answer, I asked her and got a helpful response within a few minutes. Hopefully the later replies might also be useful to others too. I did feel silly when I was given the answer, because I have used liquefy for that sort of thing before, but not for a long, long time.

The question I think triggered this... I think Kyrah's answer was more aggresive than I'd have been, but said what I'd have said more or less. The response to her had me wondering about reaching for the AR button. And yes, both this forum and the scripting tips forum have suddenly got a shed-load of people asking the same thing and not bothering to see if anyone has answered it before. Often the previous post is lower on the same page, that *really* irritates.

A lot of what I've learnt about PS I've learnt the hard way. More I've learnt from reading this forum and the people that generously share their expertise and tips, and then *using* what I need of what they show, and remembering the rest for later.

Speaking as a teacher I encourage people to ask questions too... we shouldn't stiffle it here although encouraging searching is a good idea in case it's already been answered. Why do I encourage people to ask questions? Well it helps them, and often (if they both to listen, or search here) it will help other people too.

I'm personally not saying we should stifle questions on how things work/correspond into SL.

I'm a very new user to SL and making clothes, but I would never ask questions on how to use a very basic skill in Photoshop, like what's an Alpha Channel and how do I make one. If I had never used Photoshop in my life, I personally wouldn't even attempt to make clothing unless I had some skills in Photoshop first. I'm sure some people don't have a problem answering questions on basic skills, but I feel that if you don't even have some sort of knowledge on how a program works, you really need to learn that before jumping into making clothes.

I have pretty extensive knowledge on how to use Photoshop, but I've spent the last 2 weeks reading the boards, looking at other people's work, and just playing around with the templates before I even attempted to make clothing. I did ask about making straps look better, but that's becuase I've never delt with 3D rendering. Maybe it was a basic question, I don't know. I've only made a few things so far, but it took me many attempts to get it to where I satisfied.

Maybe I shouldn't even be answering this thread, but I feel that if people want to make clothes, they have to have some knowledge on how to use Photoshop (or what ever program they use) first to make their textures.

I don't believe there's any such thing as a stupid question. Everyone learns in different ways. Some people are able to look at a thing and just figure it out, sort of intuitively decipher the logic that must have gone into its design. Other people need things verbally explained. Some need to be visually shown what to do. Some learn best by doing. There's no right or wrong in any of it.

It's too easy for a person who learns a certain way to assume that's the only way, and that those who learn differently just don't get it. I'm convinced most marriages fail due to stuff like that, each person constantly assuming the other means something other than what he or she is actually trying to say due to differing communication/interpretation styles.

One of my mentors in the business that I spent most of my adult life in once said to me, "50% of your advertising will never work. The trouble is you can never know which 50% it is, so you have to do all of it all the time." To relate that to our topic here, at least half the information that's readily available to anyone on anything will go in one ear and out the other. You can never predict what people will absorb and what they won't, so you have to provide multiple pathways for them to arrive at whatever conclusion you want them to reach.

Some people just can't see what's right in front of them until they ask, and someone says "it's here". They need to go through the process of actually asking before their brain is ready to listen. Ever know someone in school who after watching the teacher finish explaining something in detail, would always lean over to the kid next to him and say, "I don't get it. How do you do this?" and then as soon as the neighbor would begin to explain, the kid would get it in two seconds? It wasn't that he wasn't paying attention the first time around or that he was too stupid to understand or that the teacher wasn't good at explaining; it's just that he needed to ask. That's just how his brain is wired.

The fact that different people learn differently is why teachers have jobs. Think about it. The entire sum of human knowledge is available at any library, and has been for centuries, right? These days, it's practically all right at our finger tips on the internet. So why can't you just give a kid a library card and a computer, and say, "Here you go. Now get yourself that diploma."?

I'm sure there are some kids who'd do great that way, but obviously the vast majority would be completely frozen. They wouldn't learn a thing. Most people need at least some level of human interaction in order to receive information effectively.

I'm sometimes accused of over-explaining in my tutorials, but I look at it like this. It's better to make sure as many bases as possible are covered, and maybe risk having a few people feel they're be talked down to, than to leave something out, and risk having someone not understand. I know that at least half of whatever I write will go completely ignored every time, but I have no way of knowing which person will ignore which half, so I have to include it all.

Remember Denzel Washington in Philadelphia? "Explain it to me like I'm a six year old." It never fails.



As for the original question about "forcing people to learn", the answer is you can never force anyone to learn anything, but when someone wants to learn, they'll find a way. Some people are wired to discover on their own; some are wired to ask. Neither method is any better or any worse than the other. There are tremendous advantages and disadvantages to both, and I'd encourage eceryone not to make judgments when someone else's wiring differs from your own.

It's easy to feel superior by assuming your way is the only way, and that others just don't get what you get, but I can promise you, there are plenty of instances where it works the other way around. Your way might produce faster results in one area, but other ways will inevitably yield better results in other areas.

There's no wrong way to eat a Reeces.

I think generally the rush to try and make money tends to do that to many people that start off with limited skills. Whenever the end goal is to create money, they want to skip everything in between and take the shortest path possible to achieve something without understanding. Usually with disastrous results.

...wanting to do everything my self and get a copy of the "How to do this the best way possible with out spending time on the learning curve".
But I've now settled on a firm idea about what to make of my time in SL. It requires many different skills and it took me a matter of days to realize that SL is just like RL when it comes to making things. So therefore I'm getting specialists to help me with all the different steps towards my goal, having my focus on the overall outcome. Sure it costs money, RL money that is and of course I'd like to make a full RL living on this. But first things first and prove that you're worthy of getting paid for what you do

As of now, I'm looking for the best clothing designer in SL for latex outfits of the darker yet playful kind. Any reccomendations?

I don't believe people can be forced to learn. They're either motivated to learn, or not. Motivated people will get answers through whatever means yield the best results for them (as Chosen has pointed out). The forums here are obviously free for people to read, and can be a gold mine of learning material for those that take the time and effort to use the forums to their fullest extent, but the SL forums are merely the tip of the iceberg. I've learned a lot through reading and responding to SL related stuff here in the past 2-3 years. I wish I had time to post here more often, but my attention is spread over a much wider area. All the Gurus that have put so much effort into answering difficult and easy issues here are what make this place so rich in learning material. They deserve a round of applause. They're probably a huge reason why this section of the forums weren't shut down.

Since you asked, I have peceived you as rather harsh when responding to folks.

It's very hard w/ a text only environment to always portray what we want to say in the intended way, so that could be the problem.

I asked a really stupid question yesterday and felt like an idiot as soon as I saw the responses. /109/22/142783/1.html

But I'm not an idiot and had you responded to me as you have at times to others I would have probably not taken it well considering I was feeling foolish and would have been defensive beacuse it WAS such a dumb question. I still feel like an idiot....gonna go delete the damn thing.

I think Chosen pretty much nailed it. There's no one size fits all way to learn and different people have differing needs. I've always been the kind that learns best by being left alone with the tools so I can figure it out on my own and then ask very specific questions when I'm stuck on something. Having taught beginner classes in 3ds Max for eight years I've seen firsthand how many different ways people approach learning, and how what seems self-evident to some is anything but for others. That said, there are lots of people who ask questions as a way to avoid doing work themselves. In my classes I encountered many of those.

You can pretty much tell when someone's mental wheels are turning but not getting much traction and when someone's sitting in the passenger seat waiting for you to chaufer them to the place they want to go. When dealing with the latter I'd usually give oblique answers or answer with questions of my own to try and get them to make their own connections. When it comes to digital art skills and learning complex software just memorizing answers doesn't cut it. People have to learn the underlying logic of cause and effect or they'll always be dependant on having someone else tell them what to do next. It's pretty easy to tell one kind of person from another in a classroom but very difficult in a text only forum.

A great deal depends on confidence. This stuff can be very intimidating to someone just starting out because there's so much to learn. It can be like standing at the bottom of a mountain looking up at the summit and thinking "I don't know if I can climb that!" Most of them can, but they need some help to gain the confidence to do it. A problem a lot of people have is that they're looking at their desired end result as point B, and that causes them to see the journey as one enormous step which would be impossible for anyone. No one's mental legs are that long and looking at it in those terms can make even the smartest person feel like a dolt. The end result should really be point Z. B should be a very small step that's easily reachable so that they can get there quickly and feel some sense of accomplishment, and as a result, some budding confidence. I used to start my classes by telling my students that they wouldn't be walking away at the end of the two weeks as an animator ready to go get a job. That wasn't my job. My job was to give them the tools to get from point G to Z on their own, having built up their confidence and problem solving skills enough that they walk away believing they can.

That's not an easy thing to do in SL because people come here having seen all the articles about people making lots of money. How many times have you had a new user's first question to you be "how do I make money?" Your first task is to make them understand that that's the wrong question. That's point Z, and they should put that notion out of their heads until they're at least halfway through the alphabet. If at that point they're having fun with the journey and not worrying so much about the ultimate destination they'll probably get there.

What a great way of putting it. I'm starting teaching digital art classes myself, and I've always known this but struggle to put it in terms the students will understand. Thanks!