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The Joy of Typing
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Re: The Joy of Typing
#82> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??
I don't know how fast my middle-school daughter can type, but she doesn't touch-type. Her school does insist that they spend a lot of time using computers for research and writing, and they even take some standardized tests on computers, but they do not teach the kids how to type. Seems to me if you are going to have the kids using computers, then typing should be an early skill to teach them as well. On the flip sid…
You could find one of those online typing tutors for her. Why rely on the school for this, if they let you down you can just go around that using the web.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#83"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand." I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player…
I agree completely. I've always found that listening and transcribing are mutually exclusive. In university taking comprehensive notes were often helpful, but I would usually not know what had been discussed in the class until I re-read the notes later.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#84"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand." I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player…
>Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" I wouldn't be so sure. I can write and type just fine, but I always learned better in class by listening to the teacher instead of trying to produce a pile of notes. All of the kid…
One can listen and take notes at the same time. I found that taking notes helped a lot, even though I hardly ever to never reviewed them later. But it helped to strengthen what I was listening to.
The simple takeaway is that different people learn differently. Don't assume what works for you will work for others and vice versa.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#85"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand." I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player…
> If you struggle with typing, the first thing you're likely to do is reach for the mouse for anything other than text entry. Which means you reeaach over to the mouse, then mooooove the mouse, click, and...what was it you were doing again?
The same thoughtless action that comes from using a familiar tool for expression can carry over to any tool, including the mouse. I don't think about the keys or where my fingers are in relation to the keyboard when I'm typing this--the thoughts just go from my head straight to the text box where my eyes corroborate what my brain is thinking. But the same can be said for when I'm browsing the web and I move my hand to the mouse and scroll down... I don't think about it, it just happens. My brain thinks, "I wonder what's further down the page" and my body responds accordingly.
That said, there's much to be said for the efficiency of a keyboard. A few months ago I installed the Vimium Chrome extension and I've been trying to get myself to use the keyboard for scrolling down and clicking links. It's hard. My brain instinctively (still, after months) tells my hand to move to the mouse. I often need to take my hand off the mouse and go back to the keyboard to force myself to use the keyboard shortcuts.
The same is true with reading code: if your brain has no association with curly braces, you're not going to be able to scan a chunk of code and intuitively separate code within curly braces from code outside the curly braces.
So there's more to it all than just the difficulty or familiarity with the tools. It's also about skill and habits.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#86> one 2007 study measured a small group of 21 college students and found their average typing speed was an abysmal 12.2 words per minute That blows my mind. That's less than a tenth the speed I type at. How do they get anything done??
I can type that fast on a phone. I'll assume for the sake of discussion that this number is accurate across a general population. If you sit at a keyboard long enough, how can you not get faster than 12.2 wpm? So much for "kids growing up with computers". All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed? OTOH, do typing classes even exist anym…
The statistic about typing classes is indeed a sad one. You make an excellent point: "All that time in front of a keyboard since kindergarten, and you're output is still restricted by your abysmal typing speed?"
Unfortunately, in my experience, yes. I spent years using a computer doing virtually everything with it including programming before I finally got fed up with not being able to touch type. I forced myself to not look at the keys and type. It worked. (How could it not?) Later on, I had a typing class as well, but by that time I was already an excellent typist. For the kids that are less motivated however, I think they'd be stuck where I was before I decided to force myself to learn it. Since typing classes are so rare, this means that they won't even be forced to learn it (a good thing).
I don't think anyone is truly computer literate unless they can touch type. It's an essential skill, really, and while one can get by without it, the experience is hardly equivalent. So I wonder, with all the focus on CS classes in high schools, where is the focus on typing? After all, call me prejudiced, but I would never work with a programmer or writer who couldn't touch type. To me, that shows disdain or lack of interest for the profession.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#87I was really hoping this would be about type systems.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bit different. Court stenographers, along with the people who do real-time TV captions, use specialized chording keyboards (stenographs, they look like this [0]) that allow them to type words or even whole phrases with a single or just a few strokes. That's how they're fast - you can only go so far typing one letter at a time. [0] http://i.imgur.com/AgKnqWx.jpg
Right, I thought I had read you could actually enable some of the chording techniques on a standard keyboard at some time. Though, I don't recall the story. Quickly googling isn't showing too much. Regardless, I know I could get faster than I am. I hover just over 80 to 90. To get a lot faster, I was always under the impression that I would need something like that. I have also always thought that I have no need for…
With n-key rollover, you can use Plover to mimic stenotype chording on typical qwerty. It's been posted/discussed here a few times, so that might be what you're thinking of.
Re: The Joy of Typing
#89I cleaned my keyboard and ended up swapping two keys because of their proximity to the keyboard when I reset their positions. A co-worker mistyped one of the keys, then backspaced, then typed it again and on several other places on the same line before stopping, looking confused, then staring at the keyboard asking "You swapped your keys?"
"You look at the keyboard when you type?"
Re: The Joy of Typing
#90"because you’re no longer struggling with the tool at hand." I saw this coming somewhere around the first paragraph. Those students who are trying to transcribe lectures and not actually learning anything? My guess is it's because they're burning cycles mentally saying "'the', I need to find 't' and an 'h', aaaaaand 'e'. 'quick', where the hell is 'q'?" As a parallel, take Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin) as a guitar player…
If you are worried about typing speed slowing down your coding, I would assume that your code is not very well thought through in the first place. When I was at university a while ago, we were told to go and write the algorithm down on paper before coding it - a practice I find way more helpful today than any unit testing framework.
The niggley little things that cause syntax errors are likely to cause an order of magnitude more mental effort than trying to find a key. Or a crap algorithm because you dived straight into the code.
As a side note, many terminals have tab completion and most IDE's have something similar. I can't touch type, but I don't think I need to in this day and age. And I go pretty fast. So much of your argument is irrelevant for developers.