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Against 3x Speed

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Re: Against 3x Speed

#321

Post by Zarel »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #91
daenz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the same youtube plugin mentioned in the article, and watch many videos at 2.5x-3.0x speed, for the exact reason that you state. There is a lot of "filler" content that I either a) already know or b) is not relevant to what I'm trying to learn. I'm really just trying to get through that content quickly. When I get to some really dense portion though, I will turn the speed down to 1x to learn it.

In addition to what you're saying, it can also be _harder_ to watch something at 1x speed. I've found that at 1.25x-1.5x my mind is more engaged. If it's too slow, I start thinking about other things and end up getting less from the video.

I also have this problem (it might be related to my ADHD). 2x speed (with occasional pauses/rewinds) works much better for my retention; I've often explicitly noticed myself not paying attention and learning nothing at 1x.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#322

Post by bmm6o »

ben_w wrote: post #269
Ajedi32 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go even further and argue that making students read or listen to lectures for any significant length of time without them being actively engaged with the lesson is sub-optimal. Newer learning systems like Duo Lingo, ALEKS, and Brilliant do an excellent job of constantly, actively engaging students with the lesson, tightening the feedback loop between teaching the student something and checking whether they ac…

While Duolingo is certainly better than the previous school standard of “here’s a textbook, here’s an audio tape to play on loop”, it’s nowhere near the level of a private tutor. I’m currently nearing a 2000-day streak and have repeatedly gold-starred the German course as they add more content, and Duolingo isn’t the only app I’m using. Despite this, while my vocabulary is OK, I don’t conjugate even close to correctl…

I think the observation here is that not all "engagement" is equal. I really dislike Duo Lingo's pedagogy... For some reason they are opposed to actually telling you anything - grammar rules, definitions, etc - and leave you to (hopefully!) infer them one-by-one.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#323

Post by Ajedi32 »

bmm6o wrote: post #322
ben_w wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Duolingo is certainly better than the previous school standard of “here’s a textbook, here’s an audio tape to play on loop”, it’s nowhere near the level of a private tutor. I’m currently nearing a 2000-day streak and have repeatedly gold-starred the German course as they add more content, and Duolingo isn’t the only app I’m using. Despite this, while my vocabulary is OK, I don’t conjugate even close to correctl…

I think the observation here is that not all "engagement" is equal. I really dislike Duo Lingo's pedagogy... For some reason they are opposed to actually telling you anything - grammar rules, definitions, etc - and leave you to (hopefully!) infer them one-by-one.

Have you checked out the "tips" section for each lesson? That usually has pretty good descriptions of things like grammar rules.

Also, when you make a common mistake during a lesson, Duo Lingo will often interrupt the lesson with an impromptu tip showing you what your mistake was, why it was a mistake (what grammatical rules it broke, etc), and how to avoid that mistake in the future. Those have been pretty helpful in my (admittedly limited) experience, though I suppose it's possible the prevalence of those tips depends on the course.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#324

Post by robotresearcher »

aidenn0 wrote: post #264
naasking wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a matter of asking, it's mandatory. Reading is your homework, and if you don't read the night before you won't be able to do your problems and get help of you need it the day of.

But it's far simpler to check if students did 20 math problems then if they read a section of their textbook

There’s no need to check.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#325

Post by kixiQu »

memco wrote: post #56
saivan wrote: post #4

I get the point you're making - but honestly I have to raise the counter argument, which I think is equally valid. Take for example, the average lecture video. The information density is so low, that I'd imagine that a 60 minute video could be compressed into 10-12 minutes without any loss of information. It really depends on what you're listening to/watching.

Long before audio books were a public thing I received a special tape player for listening to audio recordings of my school textbooks because I have low vision. I was ecstatic to learn that I could adjust the speed and could still understand the book at something around 2-2.5x speed. I don’t know to what extent other bling or impaired persons use the speed controls but I’m guessing it’s designed because some people c…

> I’m guessing it’s designed because some people can process the information and others more slowly

Familiarity with the speaker's voice and presentation can influence this hugely. There's a news podcast I like listening to much faster than most other stuff I listen to just because I know the newscaster's voice so well.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#326

Post by JimTheMan »

serjester wrote: post #271
JimTheMan wrote: post #14

I'd argue that 95% of all learning, is learnt by doing. Merely listening to something without properly interrogating your understanding of it.. you will end up with a bunch of shallow and untested knowledge. At best, a boffin. It's imperative to build, discuss, interrogate, trial and fail.

I’m not a fan of this dichotomy - you assume the two are mutually exclusive. There's analysis paralysis (no “doing”) on one extreme and blind ambition on the other (no book knowledge). I doubt many people advocate either. Why can’t you build things while setting aside time to learn from other peoples mistakes?

I'd tend to agree with you and have perhaps leaned in a bit too hard on the doing for emphasis.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#327

Post by hdjrudni »

culebron21 wrote: post #142

I'm impressed more by the comments than the article itself. Some people insist they make progress and listen 3x, but nobody showed any practical measurements of own skills. A personal example: I used to listen to a famous linguist, and everything seemed nice and clear, but then I decided to go in details on one particular question (I think accentuantion), and opened his book. It was like if you showed your programmin…

This makes me feel better about myself. I don't like reading or listening a ton before diving it. Just give me a spoonful and then I'll do what I can with that, and come back for the next spoonful when I'm ready.

The downside is that sometimes there's a better solution in the next spoonful that I didn't think of/knew existed and then I have to redo some work to integrate the next tidbit of knowledge, but hey..at least it sticks in my noggin and I fully understand why that next bit came into existence.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#328

Post by b22d432e »

yodelshady wrote: post #160
tempestn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the type of information, for me. I love podcasts (history, policy, some news) but when I'm trying to research a topic or find instructions on something, or that kind of thing, I also vastly prefer text. Kind of drives me crazy when the most relevant source I can find is a 15 minute youtube video explaining something that could be distilled into a paragraph of text.

I would add for practical skills (including some research!) videos and podcasts seem to offer more feedback. Nobody in a book ever tells me what a flange or spline or baulk ring actually is , nobody in a video does either, but in the latter I get to see it and make my own, usually fit-for-current-purpose, inferences. Closer personal example: I spent weeks trying to bully a supervised machine learning approach into a…

I've long since come the the conclusion that most 800-page texts are terrible.

Nearly all very-large-texts I've read on technical subjects are poorly written. The early and later sections seem to have little relation to each other; Some parts will be too general and other parts too vague. It's like the author totally loses perspective.

There's a sweet spot of around 250 A5 pages where a subject can maintain consistent scope and have meaningful relationships between chapters.

There are exceptions, but they are few.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#329

Post by SergeAx »

saivan wrote: post #4

I get the point you're making - but honestly I have to raise the counter argument, which I think is equally valid. Take for example, the average lecture video. The information density is so low, that I'd imagine that a 60 minute video could be compressed into 10-12 minutes without any loss of information. It really depends on what you're listening to/watching.

And that's why reading a book or an article is 10x better than listening or watching a lecture.

There's another perk of reading: one may easily jump back couple of words or even sentences in case they need some clarity. You can't do that with A/V-recording.

Re: Against 3x Speed

#330

Post by aidenn0 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #324
aidenn0 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's far simpler to check if students did 20 math problems then if they read a section of their textbook

There’s no need to check.

I suppose it's a question of pedagogy to determine how (and how much) teachers should encourage students to present behaviors that make them more likely to learn. My experience (and many others) is that inverting the classroom ends up with the majority of the students not doing the assigned reading/listening/watching.

Most students do their math homework begrudgingly because they get in trouble otherwise; this does not mean that doing the assigned problems does not help them learn...

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