Swimmer963 comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong

113 Post author: lukeprog 09 May 2011 10:05PM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 12 May 2011 10:08:28AM *  12 points [-]

One might be underestimating the value that video lectures offer to certain people like myself. Reading a textbook demands to be proactive. If you are easily distracted, or don't really enjoy the subject, you have to force yourself to keep reading. In the case of video lectures you only have to bring yourself to start the video. Once the video is playing, your attention is naturally drawn to the ongoing action, whereas text is just inactive and has to be animated actively by the reader. Videos exhibit a tractive force, videos drag you along as they play.

Comment author: Swimmer963 12 May 2011 10:42:41AM 5 points [-]

That's interesting. I've never been able to watch video lectures for anything. I think speed is an issue. Reading, I can go at my own (fast) pace. I have a lot of randomly scattered general knowledge from past reading, so in textbooks there are bits and pieces I can skim over if I know I already understand those areas. With videos, the slower pace of speech feels dragging, and I can't tell without actually listening to the whole video whether or not I'm missing something. Videos might be an effective learning method, but for me they're less efficient. (Then again, I don't think distraction or disliking the subject has ever been my biggest problem when reading.)

Comment author: jimrandomh 12 May 2011 02:24:20PM 5 points [-]

You might want to try watching videos in a player that lets you adjust the speed, like VLC player. You still can't skim video as fast as text, but being able to apply a 2x speedup makes a lot of things much more watchable.

Comment author: malcolmocean 13 July 2013 11:54:35PM 1 point [-]

I ended up on this old thread, and just wanted to point out that most MOOCs now have players with adjustable speed. Not sure what was available 2 years ago.