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Living Life in Fast-Forward
ctwxman writes "A year and a half ago my boss approached me, asking me to finish some college courses to get certification in what I've been doing for the past 20+ years. The courses are offered by Mississippi State University. Since I live in Connecticut, I am taking my lessons on DVD and videocassette with tests, quizzes and helpful advice from TA's online. It didn't take me long to realize how s-l-o-w the whole lecture process was. But with WinDVD4, I started ramping up the speed. It didn't take long to get to 2x normal speed. Other than the lectures taking half the time, I didn't miss anything. Yes, the speech is a little clipped, but these are college lectures. There are no speed demons delivering at the MSU lectern. I posted my 'discovery' to our online student bulletin board and found many other students were scared of the idea. But, for me wearing headphones (important I think), these hyper lessons are just as good as watching at normal speed. Now, The New York Times (sacrifice of eldest child required) has legitimized my claim with this article showing how and why others are rapidly jumping on the high speed watching bandwagon."
Then why do you even show up?
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
I think that one of the reasons why you may have been able to digest the information at this faster speed is because you're already well-experienced in that area. Naturally, anyone who's been working with X for a number of years is already familiar with most of the concepts. Me, I could easily watch most computer-related lectures in double-speed and absorb 99% of the information easily. Change subjects, though, and the increased speed might be more of a hindrance.
This could seriously level the academic playing field for folks who learn better from lectures than from books. In college, I know I certainly had an easier time in many classes than my classmates because I preferred to learn from the textbooks and other reading materials rather than the lectures. Since reading isn't limited by the rate of speech of the author, you can cover more material in a given time from a book. Plus, books are random access; it's much harder to scan through a recorded lecture for something you wanted to hear. However, I know a lot of people who seem to really need the narrative provided by a lecturer to get the material. Given the speeds at which the article claims young adults are capable of comprehending spoken material, that no longer needs to be a disadvantage.
:) )
Now, all schools have to do is make lectures non-mandatory (so that students can save time by listening later at high speed, of course.
Society is moving too fast as it is - and you want to speed it up even more.
Careful thought and consideration is an important aspect of learning critical thinking - not how much you can cram into your brain at one sitting.
I see two things happening:
1. People are quick to jump to incorrect conclusions more than I remember in the past.
2. People don't stop and smell the roses in their relentless pursuit of *?
Reminds me of a parable:
A young bull and an old bull are at the top of a hill, looking down on the herd of cows.
The young bull says to the old bull, "lets run down there a meet a cow!"
The old bull responds, "lets walk down there and meet them all."
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Some people can only learn in a traditional (i.e. long boring lecture) setting. That's the way it's done in the US system in public schools and the majority of private schools so kids get trained to learn that way by default.
Personally, there are some subjects in which I need to be -taught-, not just given the info. I'm not naturally good with math, so I need extra attention and to go to every lecture. Humanities and social sciences come easily for me and I can learn those completely on my own. It also helps that I genuinely like humanities and social sciences. Since I don't care for math and hard science, I need extra structure in the process of learning it to make sure that I "get it."
Why do you think that english or philosophy are inherantly easier then OS design or quantum mechanics?
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Well, yes - but that's as in "good teaching of bright kids". If you're teaching thickies you have to go more slowly, if you're teaching clever 'uns you can speed up. I would have thought judging the pace of a lesson to be appropriate to the students you're teaching was rather self-evident.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
> lectures at hyper-speed aren't more effective.
Well, that's a good point.
I frequently give presentations, talk with analysts and the press, and speak at conferences, so I've got some experience doing different types of public speaking. I've found that the "fresher" the topic, the slower I must speak.
I remember once I had to give a presentation on specialized security issues for public networks to a selected group of very experienced, high-level, technology decision makers. Unfortunately, my presentation was last, and the previous guy went on way too long, so I had to do my 80 minute presentation in less than 30 minutes. I knew the material pretty well, so I took a deep breath, and dashed through it.
You know the look that Wile E. Coyote would have after a bomb intended for the roadrunner blew up in his face? Well, imagine an audience full of expressions like that. They understood the material, but the high-powered enema school of lecturing is a little too much when the material is unfamiliar.
The moral of the story is, if you know the material, a quick lecture isn't bad because it's generally reminding you of stuff you already know. But if you're learning something new, the pauses, rhetorical questions, and pacing all give the listener time to reflect on the material they're hearing so they can understand it better.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Yeah, I agree that it mainly depends on the density of the lecture. Same goes for books. There were some "practical" CS classes I took where it would drive me crazy to do anything other than skim the book because of all the unnecisarry fluff and verbage. On the other hand, there was this one theoretical math class I took (differential geometry), where it would take me over 10 minutes to simply parse a single page, and I would normally have to read the chapter a couple more times before fully understanding the concepts. I swear less than half of the text was actual english, the rest pure math. (and at 1/4 inch thick, it was also the most expensive textbook I ever bought :)
If we were all so satisfied back then, why was all of this built? At some point a person looked around at a world that extended less than fifty miles from where they were born and said, "Is this really it?" They weren't satisfied, and they weren't willing to sit there and accept it. They built things. They created new technologies to extend their capabilities and reach. They adapted new ways of learning so they could discover more, learn more. Sure, it wasn't all from some great altruistic desire to be better. Some sought conquest, others money, but all of it came from a deep underlying lack of satisfaction with the status quo.
I don't want to be content in the way you describe. I like having a fire to learn more, to solve problems, to push the barriers. Sure, a moment or two to savor a new love is a good thing, but so much the better if I can have that time because I was able to learn four times as much in half the time.
The problem with the lecture format is that to get anything out of the lecture, you have to read the material first.
An old professor of mine explained it to me this way: In the "old days"(his words, not mine), students were expected to have read the material first. The lecture was intended to suppliment the readings. It would "answer many questions that the students, in their minds, were already asking themselves". Nowadays, the lectures answer questions that the students haven't even asked, so the lectures themselves become irrelevant.
One solution, obviously, is stress to students that reading the material before class is the only way to get anything from the lecture. Another solution, of course, is to simply do away with lectures (which many classes have done recently).
+1 Insightful to you.
The problem with the old way of doing things is that with everything else that a college student, especially a non-traditional one, is expected to do the requirement that they read the material beforehand is impossible to fulfill. Eliminating lectures just makes this even more since you have NO chance to learn the material.
The 20 year old social darwinists that have always had straight A's and no lives will pipe up and say "waah, college is hard, do it or go be poor. And vote Bush" but when you have kids, a full-time job, and a home to take care of, there just isn't any time.
Repetition is the mother of learning.
Repetition is the mother of learning.
Repetition is the mother of learning.
Repetition is the mother of learning.
Repetition is the mother of learning.
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit
Bullshit
Repetition is the mother of rote memorization.
Comprehension is the mother of learning. Figuring out how this idea connects to that other idea so your brain has a place to grab hold.
Of course, this is coming from a guy who majored in math because everything else required too much memorization -- in math all I had to do was understand the principles and I could derive the details. I hate memorization, because I suck at it, and I hate repetition because if I understood it the first time, the 5th time will just bore me and if I didn't understand it the first time, just saying it again won't help.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Ooo...you clever troll you...it's not a single worded answer.
Nikola didn't develop AC for profit. (AC is only what is allowing you to view these very words and propel us into this age.) I'm not sure how anyone could deny "electricity" (I understand the many implications of that word) was the single best innovation in history.
It's shit, really, to declare such a man only cared about the little green men in his pocket.
You know what he did? Westinghouse came to him and said something like;
Westinghouse: "Hey, you know those royalties we have to pay you? Well with all the strains of the business, and the capitalist asshole Edison sending out all this poor stigma(*) about our product, we can't keep the business afloat without not having to pay them."
Tesla: "Is that so? Well, if you can continue to bring AC to the masses all is kosher."
So Tesla tore up the contract that granted him $2.50/horsepower of electrical capacity sold.
I'm so sick of hearing I am another cog in the wheel. Believe it or not, there are people in this world that give a shit. Just because there is a majority, doesn't mean it applies to everyone and there is no escape. Greed has it's niche, but it's not an overly prevalent attribute in EVERYONE...jeezers.
* Edison would display public demonstrations of electrocuting animals (mostly pets) using AC. He also successfully had a criminal electrocuted by AC, thus the term, Westinghoused. Keep in mind after it was inevitable AC was clearly the dominant system, Edison became a convert.
And yet I am quite willing to guess that the majority of people found life satisfying. Why? Because we were living the way we had lived for thousands of generations.
... this is hard-wired into our DNA. It doesn't matter how revolutionary the changes of the past 300 years have been -- when you are working against millions of years of evolution...
Er, so all people everywhere lived exactly the same way for thousands of generations? Not hardly.
So were they satisfied? Got me, I don't have your time machine, so I can't go ask them. But, at a guess, I don't think any group of humans would choose to work in the fields all day long and die of starvation, exposure, or plague if offered an alternative. Would you?
Appreciating certain things, wanting to live a certain way
No, we're not "working against millions of years of evolution". We're fulfilling it. The same genetic code that gives humans the unprecidented intelligence and adapatibility to survive also hardwires the desire to do it better.
Subsistence farmers got tired of being hunter-gatherers. They figured out the advantages of living together in towns and cities, working together instead of living in mutual fear. And somewhere along the way, someone realized that pounding grain into flour all day with a rock was a stupid waste of their time, so they built a machine to do it for them. And a couple thousand years later, someone came to the same conclusion about walking all day long to get anywhere, and they did the same thing. The rest, as they say, is history.
You are going to start to get masses of people starting to feel disconnected from their family and friends and feel oppressed by their jobs or the ruling class or the amount of email in their inbox every morning or being stuck in traffic or... or something. And it isn't like those types of oppression haven't always existed in some form or other. But they haven't FELT so urgent before because we've been GROUNDED before.
Oh, nothing urgent at all, I'm sure. "Well, our daughters were raped and killed by the tribe over the hill, and our crops failed, and our life expectancy is about 40 years, and everyone we know is dying covered with weeping pustules, and none of us are allowed to read or write. But thank God we aren't forced to sit in traffic jams and contemplate the state of our inboxes."
But hey, I'm not GROUNDED like they were, so what do I know?
But now...? Most people, it feels as though they are on a cart sliding down a very fast hill, out-of-control, with no brakes.
Speak for yourself. We've never had it so good.
And we keep picking up speed. Ask anyone over 80 about how they see the world today. ("Of course -they- will think that everything is moving too quickly. When -they- were growing up the world was..." And, of course, that is exactly the point.)
No, the point is that this is normal. The way it's always been. Today's pace only seems faster and less manageable to some because they're alive now and experiencing it, rather than romanticizing the past. Stop imagining that happy time when everyone was "satisfied", before all this evil ol' civilzation and technology came along and screwed stuff up. It never existed, and, short of St Peter's Pearly Gates, it never will.