For the sake of trying to add some nuance, it's not the DVDs I dislike, it's one particular phrase I hear from people who only ever buy DVDs and downloads: "I'm a visual learner." A little bit of knowledge in the hands of a fool is problematic.
The thing is, visual learning style is a real thing. The other two types are auditory and kinesthetic. But they don't mean what most people think they mean. It's not about what stimuli you learn from. If that were the case, a book with line drawings of hands would work just as well as a DVD to educate these kids who insist they're too visual to learn from books. Rather, it's how you contextualize the information you take in.
True visual learners like myself create vast, intricate maps and webs of interconnected information in our minds.
You see this? That's what goes on in my brain. It has nothing to do with whether or not the thing I'm learning from has moving pictures or not.
Auditory learners have much more structured thinking. They break all their knowledge down into lists, categories, dissertations, flow-charts, timelines. Like music, everything has a clear and logically consistent progression in their minds.
Kinesthetic learners have to do something. After hearing a lecture, they then need to go out and apply it to something or they'll have a much harder time internalizing it. They think in an extremely abstract level of actions, motions, and cause and effect. I'm told that a lot of autistic people are kinesthetic learners, but that might be apocryphal.
The point is, it's not the medium. There are only a handful of exceptions where the medium really does make a difference. This insistence by my generation and younger that they only want to buy DVDs because they've self-diagnosed themselves as visual learners without any comprehension of what that actually means is bull****.
