Audio and video lectures are much less annoying when you play them faster—I find I’m able to listen to most video content at 2.5-3 times normal speed, and most audio at about twice normal speed, both with increased retention (I get less bored, so my mind wanders less).
A couple of time-saving hacks related to speeding up audio or video lectures:
QuickTime is great at tempo shifting video and audio to play it back faster without shifting the pitch (“chipmunking”). Look for QuickTime’s A/V controls, and “Playback speed”. You have to be sitting at your computer to use this, which brings me to…
If you use a portable media player, PodShifter will shift (speedup without chipmunking) podcast feeds. If your audio isn’t in a feed, HuffDuffer will make individual online media files into a feed, to which you can subscribe using PodShifter. PodShifter is free to use. (I have a financial interest in PodShifter, but this comment doesn’t feel spammy to me—please downvote it if you disagree.)
The open source Soundtouch library includes soundstretch, which can do audio tempo shifting locally. Audacity can also do local shifting (look for Effects > Tempo shift).
I just listened to 20 minutes of lecture in about 15 minutes of real time, and I had an epiphany: the conventional college lecture is now dead to me. It’s still shuffling around a little, but believe me it’s dead. Here are some advantages of moving the lectures proper to online video and holding just the discussion/help sessions in person:
The ability to tempo shift. Holy hell this is awesome. I’ve had terribly boring classes that actually would have been tolerable if only they had been conducted at roughly twice the speed, and even more interesting classes would have been much improved by an extra 50% more speed, preferably along with the ability to continuously vary the amount of tempo shift. The key here is that the lecture goes fast enough to keep your brain turned on; few things are more demoralizing than helplessly wishing you could fall asleep in class.
If the lectures include (say) PDF slides with timing information to synchronize them with the video, things get even better. You can stick in links to web pages, or you can jump around to relevant sections in the video, and generally just have a grand nonlinear time. It’s the Wikipedia effect: chasing interesting information around the vast space of human knowledge is a profoundly effective way of learning.
The marginal costs of making the lectures available publicly are tiny. The rising tide of access to education is guaranteed to uplift humanity as a whole, even if Joe Average doesn’t notice.
Good lecturers can drive out bad ones. Who hasn’t sat in a boring lecture that was taught better by someone else? That’s only necessary because class sizes are traditionally limited by the number of warm bodies you can cram into one room.
The learning is available whenever you want it. That flexibility also means that nobody is riding your ass to get you to keep up with your studying, but I’m sure that that service can be provided separately.
By the way, does anybody know a good source of interesting audio lectures with RSS feeds that I can give to PodShifter? I’ve been looking around iTunes University, and they’ve got a lot of good stuff, but trying to get an RSS URL from them is like trying to tape weasels to a wall: so irritatingly difficult that you start to wonder why you even tried. The pedagogical revolution needs to get easier, comrades!
Audio and video lectures are much less annoying when you play them faster—I find I’m able to listen to most video content at 2.5-3 times normal speed, and most audio at about twice normal speed, both with increased retention (I get less bored, so my mind wanders less).
A couple of time-saving hacks related to speeding up audio or video lectures:
QuickTime is great at tempo shifting video and audio to play it back faster without shifting the pitch (“chipmunking”). Look for QuickTime’s A/V controls, and “Playback speed”. You have to be sitting at your computer to use this, which brings me to…
If you use a portable media player, PodShifter will shift (speedup without chipmunking) podcast feeds. If your audio isn’t in a feed, HuffDuffer will make individual online media files into a feed, to which you can subscribe using PodShifter. PodShifter is free to use. (I have a financial interest in PodShifter, but this comment doesn’t feel spammy to me—please downvote it if you disagree.)
The open source Soundtouch library includes soundstretch, which can do audio tempo shifting locally. Audacity can also do local shifting (look for Effects > Tempo shift).
I just listened to 20 minutes of lecture in about 15 minutes of real time, and I had an epiphany: the conventional college lecture is now dead to me. It’s still shuffling around a little, but believe me it’s dead. Here are some advantages of moving the lectures proper to online video and holding just the discussion/help sessions in person:
The ability to tempo shift. Holy hell this is awesome. I’ve had terribly boring classes that actually would have been tolerable if only they had been conducted at roughly twice the speed, and even more interesting classes would have been much improved by an extra 50% more speed, preferably along with the ability to continuously vary the amount of tempo shift. The key here is that the lecture goes fast enough to keep your brain turned on; few things are more demoralizing than helplessly wishing you could fall asleep in class.
If the lectures include (say) PDF slides with timing information to synchronize them with the video, things get even better. You can stick in links to web pages, or you can jump around to relevant sections in the video, and generally just have a grand nonlinear time. It’s the Wikipedia effect: chasing interesting information around the vast space of human knowledge is a profoundly effective way of learning.
The marginal costs of making the lectures available publicly are tiny. The rising tide of access to education is guaranteed to uplift humanity as a whole, even if Joe Average doesn’t notice.
Good lecturers can drive out bad ones. Who hasn’t sat in a boring lecture that was taught better by someone else? That’s only necessary because class sizes are traditionally limited by the number of warm bodies you can cram into one room.
The learning is available whenever you want it. That flexibility also means that nobody is riding your ass to get you to keep up with your studying, but I’m sure that that service can be provided separately.
By the way, does anybody know a good source of interesting audio lectures with RSS feeds that I can give to PodShifter? I’ve been looking around iTunes University, and they’ve got a lot of good stuff, but trying to get an RSS URL from them is like trying to tape weasels to a wall: so irritatingly difficult that you start to wonder why you even tried. The pedagogical revolution needs to get easier, comrades!
Is there software that will compress the empty spaces between words and sentences more than the words and sentences?
I’m pretty sure that’s one of the things quicktime does. Probably all of these do, but qt is the only one I’ve tried.