hogan@AEROSPACE.ARPA (04/08/86)
Dave Serafini
We got the Army video tapes almost two year's ago because they were
GFE through the Air Force program office we support. I reviewed them and
immediately requested purchase of the Alsys Video tapes.
The quality of the Army tapes was technically poor: poor quality sound of
the instructor (Bill Carlson, of HOLWG fame), poor lighting, poor quality
of the slides. The written material accompanying the slides was also
poor, being done on simply a speech-writter, not type-set.
About the technical content of the material (i.e. the Ada course itself), I
felt Carlson's approach was un-conventional and a bit unorganized, although
his discussion of numeric types was good.
The bottom line was the technical quality of the Army tapes was so vastly
inferior to the Alsys tapes (or even a MacDonald's commercial), that they
distracted from the information being presented. And the information
presented was not the best organization for beginning students.
Using video tapes for training always leaves something to be desired, so you want the best quality possible. The Alsys tapes were done using professional
video services to produce the vu-graphs and not just pointing the video
camera at the projector. In fact all the vu-graphs were complete re-edited
after the presentation. Also Alsys has a complete set of transcripts of the
text of the tapes available for those who want to read parts of the presentationThey have been very supportive to work for and the quality of the materials
was good. Call Lisa Able at Alsys for more information (617) 890-0030.
Michael Hogan
Aerospace Corp.
ps. and no I don't work for Alsys or have any other connection with them than
having bought the Ada tapes.