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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."
I did a similar thing at my job.
When I was hired on here I had to view 2-ish hours of safety videos ("Look at that 1 kilo pipe wrench soar into the bore of that MRI machine from 3 meters away! Fear!!") I don't work in the labs with glass, animals or tissue. Unless one of the SGI Origins becomes self-aware ala Skynet.. you get the idea.. anyhow many of the videos were not applicable to me or my work.
Fortunately they were on CDs in Quicktime format and the Quicktime viewer had a fast play option for those lulls in the video. (the Flying Wrench O' Death was really cool, it's the highlight of the whole video set that anyone every talks about.)
Trolling is a art,
Once again, Google News comes to the rescue.
As a long-time ReplayTV user who is active on the ReplayTV Forum of the AVS Forum, I can say that this is a feature that has been often requested. The ability to be able to watch TV recordings at a faster speed with pitch-adjusted audio would be great for watching things like news shows, etc.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I think you've used technology to rediscover one of the points of good teaching. Probably over a decade ago, there was a study of what qualities make for compelling teaching. I remember one of them was NOT s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g out every comcept in excruciatingly slothish manner so "no child gets left behind". One of the most desired qualities was, in fact, speaking quickly to maintain interest.
But this is material that you've had 20+ years of experience with. I would hope that you can watch/listen to the lectures at 2x the speed and still follow along. I would also hope that you could skip a few lectures and not be left confused.
Take a student who has had no experience with the subject matter. You think this approach would still work well?
I suppose its relative to the complexity of the subject matter and the ability of the student to digest information, but I would argue, that for the most part, lectures at hyper-speed aren't more effective.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
I'm from MS, so I can say this. The reason that this works is because we talk half as fast.
It looks like my mentally handicapped son (almost 6) with a P.I.Q. of 50, also has this preference. He always asks us to play his favourite video at twice the normal speed, especially if he already has watched them before.
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.
I recently took an introductory accounting class at BYU. The professor had prepared CDROMs with lecture videos. He actually paid licensing fees to a company that produces media speed-up software for Windows, because he wants students to watch the videos at a higher speed (I just used mplayer -speed 2 instead). He repeatedly emphasized how much a better experience it is when you watch the lectures faster.
Fsirt we dvsiceor taht plepoe can urenntdasd wtrtien wdors wehn the idnise lrtetes are all sralmbecd up...
...andnowwelearnthattheMicroMachineManwasn'tans olatedphenomenonandthatalmostanyonecanunderstand
i
spokenlanguageevenifit'sspedupbeyondallreason.
Amazing, really. When you think about how much garbage the brain's communication centers are capable of interpreting, it's almost a wonder we got as far as written language at all.
Network 23 has announced new high speed commercials, aka "blipverts," applying similar technology, albeit with the occasional side effect.
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
That's the way we do it in Oxford (for some subjects anyway). We have lectures and tutorials, but the lectures are non-compulsory. The tutorials are 1- or 2-on-1 and thus you actually get something out of them.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
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.
The estimated viewing time for this training video is 15.62 minutes.
More than 18 minutes -- Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g. possible unauthorized restroom break).
16-18 minutes -- Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.
15.63-16 minutes -- Asswipe. Not to be trusted.
Exactly 15.62 minutes -- Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.
14-15.61 minutes -- Employee is an efficient worker, may someteimes miss emportant details.
10-14 minutes -- Keep an eye on this employee; maybe developing slipshod attitude.
6-10 minutes -- Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.
Less than 6 minutes -- Disable fast-forward button on the user's video player, re-block Slashdot.org on the company firewall.
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
...freshman year, I'd record lectures and sleep through class (yes, I can learn just fine that way thanks), friday afternoon when I had no class I'd dump the tapes to my drive and use Peak to cut the running time by about half. Took a while to actually process (200mhz 603ev!), but by Saturday morning I could roll over, put my headphones on, and catch up a week in about 2 hours. hungover no less!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Personally, I think the best thing a Uni student will ever own is a variable speed notetaker.
:)
Also known as a pen?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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."
A similar, but by no means identical, feature is available for TiVos now, and may work with ReplayTV as well since I don't think TiVo had to explicitly implement it. If you use TiVo at the first fast-forward speed, which IIRC is 3x, the close captioning still works. Thus, if you are watching a close-captioned show and it's bogging down, you can zip things up to 3x, which is a good reading speed, and still know what's going on.
(There are backdoors to tweak whether it's exactly 3x or not, but I don't know if they are still in the latest TiVo software and use at your own risk. I don't know anything about how they interact with this "feature".)
It's actually a little faster then my TV can handle it; sometimes the CC starts to lag and you need to slow down to normal speed briefly to allow the TV to catch up. If it happens to you, you'll understand what I mean when you see it.
I'm sure you can do the math as to how much TV you can watch in an hour at 3x, but more importantly in my experience is zipping through the middle of boring things without actually missing what's being said. (As mentioned in the parent post, I sometimes watch the entire local news, except weather which my wife wants to see, this way though; when the news is dumbed down to an elementary school level accelerating it by 3x is about right. Plus the psychological impact of the continuously and unrepresentatively negative stories is greatly reduced which still transferring the information. I prefer it to reading local newspapers, which is not saying much.)
With a Tivo, you can watch at the lowest fast-forward speed (2x) with closed captions enabled on your TV. The captions still come through because the Tivo captures them during broadcast and reinserts them into the encoded stream.
"I put my 20-minute workout tape on twice as fast, so it only took ten minutes." -- Ghostbusters
Some professors deliver their lectures. They pay close attention to pacing, they give students time to take notes, they engage students. I wouldn't recommend listening to these profs at high speed, especially if you're taking notes.
Others just drone. I'd fast forward these anyway.
The question really is: is it about the process or the information? Depends on the teaching style, and so should your approach.
"My Doctor learned to operate by watching DVDs and The Learning Channel!"
- The first time we had devices in for service it was assumed that someone had touched the speech rate knob while unpacking the thing - as no living thing possible could make any sense of what the synthesis produced at that rate. I guess that it may help that the voice is always the same, though.
I had a blind guy working for me a few years back who had the rate on his screen-resading software turned up so fast that it was just a buzz of noise. I was unable to pick anything out from the voice, but he was able to hear it all an understand it without problems.Email was somewhat interesting from him. It contained punctuation, but usually precious little formatting like paragraph breaks (or at times spaces) because his software didn't "read" a paragraph break, he never added them when typing.
And his ability to recall voices was scary. The first day he was in the office our then sysadmin was introduced and said, "Hi." That's it, just "hi". The blind guy said, "Hey, I know you... You're Rob." At some point several years ago he had spoken briefly on the phone to this guy and was able to recall the voice and pin it to a name. Amazing...
Quick! Patent that idea now!
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Check out MITs OpenCourseWare if that's your thing.
Our favorite media player once again cames to help:
mplayer -speed <value>
The best thing is that you can use float values such as "0.8", "1.5" and so on.
--
The world would be better if Bill Gates decided to finish his course at the university.
People don't stop and smell the roses in their relentless pursuit of *
... 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...
...you are going to start to get discontent. 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. 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. 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.)
I'm not really sure what the end result of all this hurrying and efficiency is really for. While I have no doubt that this sort of "speed learning" might allow one to increase the "breadth" of what they know, it most certainly comes at the expense of depth.
Let's think of it another way: Did human beings live satisfying lives 25,000 years ago? Now, I'm not talking about comfortable or easy or long, I am talking about satisfying. They didn't have television or the Internet or the Borg Cube TNG DVD boxed set. No video games. No cell phones. No call waiting caller ID. And while it is true that a small fraction of people migrated from time to time, the vast majority of people lived within 50 miles of where they were born their whole life. So there wasn't a lot of traveling going on. There weren't a lot of "new and exciting" people. The pace of change was slower...
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. Appreciating certain things, wanting to live a certain way
Why, why, why, why are we all moving so fast? Hurrying to get to a destination that no one has ever explained to me? Why do I have to pack it all in? Why wolf down when you can savor? Why drive when you can walk? When you are on a first date with someone you really like, do you want to hurry hurry hurry and do everything there is to do in your city right then? Or is there something to just taking a few moments outside of time to stare into each other's eyes? Why can't life be like that?
(And I am leaving out one of the most terrible costs that this faster pace of life has come at: Large pockets of selectively honed DNA disappearing forever (i.e. going extinct))
There are circumstances where a person might "need" to learn a large amount of information in a short amount of time. I don't want to take away from the article or the gee-whiz factor. It is fascinating. The brain really is capable of many amazing things. But this hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry fanaticism just makes no sense to me.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
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.
Haven't secretaries been using this for years? I remember seeing one device that had a pedal on the floor attached to the audio playback. The transcriptionist could control the speed of playback to match the rate at which she was typing. Not only does this work in both directions easily (try THAT with fastforward / rewind) but is more interactive because she can use her foot and thus not even stop what she's doing to control her speed.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
+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.
When my youngest brother was about 4 years old, every day he'd wake up and watch at least one of the Star Wars trilogy in the morning which one of my other brothers had gotten on VHS.
Soon, he had them each memorized, and would speak the lines along with the characters and jump around like he was in the movie.
But this took a lot of time, and being a busy four year old, he, like our OP, started watching them in play-fastforward. And he'd jump around yelling out the every line in the movie at double speed.
To entertain guests me or my brothers would feed him a couple lines from those movies and he'd take off and start performing - double speed theater.
He rarely missed a line, and even had much of the Jabba-the-Hut sounds memorized correctly.
He's a teenager now, and when I last asked him about this, he says he's forgotten and can't remember any of the lines.
But I'm pretty sure he's lying...