YouTube: The Unlikeliest Tech Teacher

YouTube has wrangled with lawsuits and criticism for the past several months, but there’s no stopping the growth in usage of the video sharing site. By virtue of the sheer critical mass of grassroots videos that YouTube houses, you can find unexpectedly good content if you look around. For web workers, in particular, the site is home to a huge number of useful technology tutorials, where the audio and the video are good enough to quickly teach you many useful lessons.

Often, tutorials posted on YouTube are put there by people who have stumbled on useful technology workarounds. The good news is, they’re available to you for free. I recently spent some time ferreting out some of the more compelling tech tutorials on the site, and I’ll point you to several of them in this post.


YouTube houses many Macintosh- and Windows-focused tutorials, and lots of tutorials on topics such as doing hardware upgrades. I found a very useful series of tutorials on Mac OS X tips and tricks. Want to upgrade the memory and hard drive on a MacBook? There’s a clear, step-by-step example available, and you can pause the lesson as you follow along.

Likewise, the Harvard University Extension School has a good tutorial on doing a memory upgrade for a PC. If you’re a Mac or PC user interested in specialized tasks such as running a virtual machine, spend some time searching the site.

Are you a Windows user? I found an excellent tutorial on Windows XP and there are Windows Vista tutorials available too. In addition, many users have contributed tutorials on Microsoft Word, Office 2007, and other Windows applications.

YouTube also houses good tutorials on HTML, blog creation and design, easy web page creation, and one lesson I particularly liked on using Photoshop to build nice looking graphical web pages. No matter what hardware, operating system, or applications you use, you can probably learn a lot if you spend a few minutes letting the YouTubers assist you.

What technology-based video tutorials do you like on the web?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post