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Expertise in the Age of YouTube

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Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#91

Post by yabadabadoes »

adz_6891 wrote: post #89
yabadabadoes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree with the OP, if something is primarily text oriented then it probably is more efficient to learn it using a great deal of text. The whole learning styles thing is not really something that should be perpetuated: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-... Motivation and styles is probably a different matter. There is the problem that self motivated learners can only learn if they a…

I wonder whether the point is more to do with memory. If you can show a person remembers more from watching an instructor code out an example on screen compared to reading a text based tutorial, and they spend the same time doing both, then it may follow that it's more efficient for that individual to learn in a non-text based manner. In practice, I wonder whether this non-text based learning is more useful in the ea…

I have to agree, for example, there are many things about programming and getting a non-academic job that I have learned from watching programming videos and many things at a higher academic level or for contributing to a codebase that I have learned from skills picked up from texts and working with text based documentation. The problem I see with the a focus on learning styles for individuals is that they add additional layers of complexity and ultimately more ethical failures by claiming with little or no proof that different learners have vastly different capabilities in a whole bunch of categories that are innate rather than a matter of practice.

Given that subjects have inherent styles of medium that become more essential as you approach expert and need to interact with experts in an efficient way, if you convince someone they have an innate problem you deprive them of the motivation to become an expert, and you see more and more people going to a junior level and dropping out.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#92

Post by mrkstu »

kd5bjo wrote: post #72
angleofrepose wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're referring to but I'd be interested if you shared more. I don't know the references you make, though I do know the Alan Kay nano-Dijkstra quote. I contest your second point, by definition my pensil and paper are not executable environments. My brain is, but this gets us into the game of "how much computer can you simulate with your brain." Why do we play the game of simulate-the-computer? We'v…

Fundamentally, it's the act of using your brain to simulate the computer that actually teaches your brain how the computer works so that you can reason about it later. In most domains, I find it best to start with doing things yourself, and only move on to the tool-assisted version once you thouroughly understand what the tool is doing for you. That way, you are still reasoning about the underlying system when workin…

Similarly in my domain of computer networking, the best advice I received was 'be the packet' - i.e. visualize the steps/hops the packet would take through the network and where are the decisions about forwarding would happen and what evaluations would be made to make that determination.

Troubleshooting became much easier as I took that advise.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#93

Post by sgt101 »

Dowwie wrote: post #78

One project that anyone reading Hacker News ought to not be afraid of taking on is that which involves under-sink plumbing. There are so many valuable instructional videos on YouTube that will show you how to do the work correctly. If you mess up, the materials are inexpensive and easily replaceable. The risk of doing the work incorrectly is relatively low. The greatest cost is of personal time. You'll end up making…

pro tip: clear out under the sink and TAKE A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE PIPE WORK before taking it apart.

It is a fun and interesting puzzle project putting it back together blind. It's not impossible. But it is tedious.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#94

Post by pinouchon »

rorykoehler wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same hard-learned rule of thumb wrt. websites in general. The cleaner looking, the more up to date with current web trends a website, the worse information on it. I've also spotted an inverse correlation between the amount of ads on page and trustworthiness of the information on it. I explain it to myself in a similar way: people with nice, clean, heavy websites, sprinkling ads in between the text, are con…

It’s time for the anti-seo spam filter for search engines

I have been thinking about this recently. That applies to physical products too: the highest quality products are usually not the ones with the best marketing. What we need is a SEO-resistant search engine (for tutorials, products & services). Maybe a way to approach this would be to have the engine function more like an independent amazon-review engine where it's really hard to put fake reviews and have a "quality index" that's community based. I think that the successor to google will look like this: a search engine that cuts through SEO and marketing, and shows you the actual good stuff.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#95

Post by fuzzybear3965 »

codetrotter wrote: post #9
fuzzybear3965 wrote: post #5

In college I met a friend who had a MacBook whose keyboard layout was assembled using the Dvorak layout (this was in 2009). Roll forward a couple of years and I had met another friend who used his OS to map QWERTY to Dvorak. Inspired, I spent a few days during Christmas break learning a new keyboard layout. It's still what I use today. Roll forward a couple of more years and I'm working on my Ph.d. and have the thoug…

> I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal. I've been using the Dvorak layout since 2009. First on a TypeMatrix 2030 USB for a long time and currently with an ErgoDox EZ Shine that I bought like a year ago or something (w…

I took a look at your configuration and there are definitely some things that I'm going to steal. Where's your shift key, though?!

> This whole layout resides on the keyboard itself.

This was a game-changer for me. No toggling between DV and US, anymore.

Regarding stenography for coding, I will probably only use stenographic typing for software documentation (prose). The main use for stenographic typing will be blog posts, emails, HN comments, etc.

With the ability for the Ergodox EZ to emulate a serial port , I can use Plover+Ergodox EZ as layer 1, say, and Dvorak as layer 0, without needing to change anything at the OS or application level when I do this (Dvorak will be seen as a USB HID which Plover won't see and steno-mode will be seen as a serial connection, which gets processed by Plover and forwarded to the OS).

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#96

Post by codetrotter »

fuzzybear3965 wrote: post #95
codetrotter wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I stumble upon the Ergodox EZ, a fully-featured workhorse. I quickly become frustrated at my reduced typing speed and seek out a better solution. Cue Plover and the OpenStenography project. Learning stenographic typing is my next life goal. I've been using the Dvorak layout since 2009. First on a TypeMatrix 2030 USB for a long time and currently with an ErgoDox EZ Shine that I bought like a year ago or something (w…

I took a look at your configuration and there are definitely some things that I'm going to steal. Where's your shift key, though?! > This whole layout resides on the keyboard itself. This was a game-changer for me. No toggling between DV and US, anymore. Regarding stenography for coding, I will probably only use stenographic typing for software documentation (prose). The main use for stenographic typing will be blog…

> I took a look at your configuration and there are definitely some things that I'm going to steal.

Glad to hear that :)

> Where's your shift key, though?!

The main shift key is on the left side, below the "Esc / Ctrl" button. Additionally I have a secondary shift key on the opposite side that is activated when holding it pressed, but I actually never use the secondary shift key, only the main shift key. Same with right hand side ctrl, I never use that one either, and layer 3 is empty so I don't use the activation key for layer 3 either. Other than that I use all of the buttons on layer 0.

The other layers have quite a few keys that I don't use however, so I should probably update my config to reflect that.

While I am at it I am going to rearrange the Fn keys a bit, because I always struggle to remember where I put F12 exactly so I end up counting from the known position of F1 up to key F12. And the situation where I need F12 of course is when I am going to do something in BIOS/UEFI settings on some computer and like you know you only have like 2 seconds to press the correct key :P So I should make it so that I have F12 at the natural position that is the very top right corner.

Actually, let me go ahead and do that now real quick.

Here: https://configure.ergodox-ez.com/ergodox-ez/layouts/PBKjJ/Zq...

This one now has the unused keys removed, and layers 1 and 2 merged, as well as the () and {} and [] quick-access keys repositioned because while I've been using the [] and the {} quick-access keys a lot I've been a little bugged by my choice of position for them. After making the modifications above I flashed that config to the ErgoDox, meaning that what you see there is matches exactly what I use which is now all that is on my ErgoDox and none of the keys that I thought might be nice to have but which I never use :)

> Regarding stenography for coding, I will probably only use stenographic typing for software documentation (prose). The main use for stenographic typing will be blog posts, emails, HN comments, etc.

I see, makes sense.

> With the ability for the Ergodox EZ to emulate a serial port , I can use Plover+Ergodox EZ as layer 1, say, and Dvorak as layer 0, without needing to change anything at the OS or application level when I do this (Dvorak will be seen as a USB HID which Plover won't see and steno-mode will be seen as a serial connection, which gets processed by Plover and forwarded to the OS).

You have me convinced. I do type quite a lot of prose text too, and I knew vaguely that someone was using the ErgoDox EZ for stenography, but I didn't know how and I didn't know that Ergodox EZ could emulate a serial port. Do you have any links about how to set this up for Plover with the ErgoDox EZ? Otherwise I am sure I will figure it out eventually :)

Edit: Actually, tab is missing from the layout in the web UI for some reason. Put it back in place and changed the link in this comment to point to the version that has tab put back in place.

Edit 2: Made some small adjustments to the positions of some of the keys and flashed the modified to my ErgoDox EZ. Updated link and some of the text in this comment surrounding that link.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#97

Post by cgriswald »

yabadabadoes wrote: post #88
jowsie wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you sit me in front of a dense book of text I'm going to read the same line 3 times over before noticing and the information still wouldn't have gone in. Different people learn in different ways.

I have to agree with the OP, if something is primarily text oriented then it probably is more efficient to learn it using a great deal of text. The whole learning styles thing is not really something that should be perpetuated: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-... Motivation and styles is probably a different matter. There is the problem that self motivated learners can only learn if they a…

Words are text oriented but if you’re learning the word “blue”, text isn’t going to help you a whole lot. It’ll help you spell it and recognize the word, but it won’t help you understand what the color means nearly as well as a video which shows the word but also several images of blue things.

I’m not at all convinced that programming is primarily text oriented in any case. The underlying concepts are mathematical and logical, not textual. People don’t learn through text or video. Those are mediums. They learn through metaphor and relationships.

So the question is which medium gets those metaphors across most efficiently. Consider, for instance, a binary tree. It’s a metaphor. And I’d be willing to bet most people new to the topic would learn that metaphor better (or at least faster) with a person drawing out a tree and pointing to the path a program would take to add/remove/list/etc. the nodes on the tree than they would seeing a block of code and having someone explain it in text.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#98

Post by wilsmex »

peterangular wrote: post #35
wilsmex wrote: post #30

I’ve been working on my YouTube educational channel html/css/design ( https://youtube.com/FollowAndrew ) for a bit now. Pickup is slow, but it’s been fun helping a greater audience learn new skills!

I mean this in the kindest way possible, but do you think it's appropriate to teach such new CSS selectors? I just bounced around the slider on your featured video and I'm seeing stuff that only hits 85-90% on caniuse.com which is unacceptable for the apps I typically do. I still have a lot of IE11 that's used in large corps, etc. I'd LOVE to use things like grid-template but I can only imagine the fallout - I've onl…

That’s a pretty good question actually, and difficult to address. I try and push new concepts/tech as a way of education on what’s coming.

For edu channels it seems it’s a balance of teaching core concepts and also teaching what’s “popular” to keep folks interested.

You have to make a cutoff at some point with caniuse, as I suppose to get 100% coverage we’d still be doing table-based layouts or float hacks. The old adage of “know your audience” will eventually dictate the tech.

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#99

Post by djokkataja »

> And it feels like a category error to ask which accountant, or political pundit, is the Greatest of All Time, but the answers surely matter more for the human project than the ones for Scrabble or League of Legends—where data and answers are readily available.

It feels like a category error because it is a category error. Competitive games have a finite set of explicitly defined rules and win conditions; jobs do not.

> Even small changes along these lines would be a big deal. Imagine if each of us got as good at our jobs as the average teenager is at Fortnite.

I think the average person is already probably better at their job than the average teenager is at Fortnite; it's just that the "win conditions" for an average person at a job are significantly more complex and can vary quite a bit between different people and situations.

For example, besides whatever people themselves consider to be a "win" at their jobs, there's also things like this: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-05-29

Re: Expertise in the Age of YouTube

#100

Post by thekyle »

rorykoehler wrote: post #86
TeMPOraL wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same hard-learned rule of thumb wrt. websites in general. The cleaner looking, the more up to date with current web trends a website, the worse information on it. I've also spotted an inverse correlation between the amount of ads on page and trustworthiness of the information on it. I explain it to myself in a similar way: people with nice, clean, heavy websites, sprinkling ads in between the text, are con…

It’s time for the anti-seo spam filter for search engines

This is quite a difficult thing to build. Google has a whole web spam team dedicated to trying to fight SEO.
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