k_soul_search

Video learning is the focus of this blogpost, including scripted and animated slide shows, and recorded conference presentations (most boring).

Video learning is popular among majority of (esp. younger) learners but in my experience inferior to print publication. This observation applies to both tech xx and recreational xx. If you don’t bother to learn, then video is fine as a passive, laid-back recreation.

Videos have shorter shelf-life on the web. Too heavy, and they become outdated faster than text documents. Therefore, if my learning notes refer to a video URL it often becomes broken.

— eg: I watched some popular talks by leading intellectuals (+ some recorded tech lectures). The video format proved downright inferior to print media. Most video xx materials are for recreational, not acredited education, or technical learning, or serious self-growth.

• no browsing fwd and esp. backward
• no pencil-highlighting
• no note-taking on the margin in my own words… crucial to digesting/assimilation…
• no review, which is crucial for virtually all of my learning.
• no comparing two sentences across pages.
• The courseware can’t show permanent lists, tables or graphs since there’s only one page on display.  These “pictorials” are essential for reinforcement, clarification, comparison/contrast, highlighting similarities or key differences …
• You can’t focus on one difficult, confusing, or surprise phrase and let it sink in, unless you pause the video.
• You can’t copy-paste a paragraph into a blog to comment on it.
• .. You can’t refer to a page in a book either.
• ^^ Overall, reading is far more efficient and less tiring. The learner is far more in control

— eg: studying youth drug culture .. For years I had a deep concern over juvenile drug culture in the U.S. The numerous online resources [pictorials, videos, FAQ..] were long available to me but don’t provide me enough psychological relief. A paradox.

Now I guess that subconsciously I always knew I ought to commit myself and “study” this subject, but the prospect of online learning was /unappealing/unpleasant, heavy, even dreadful.

Then came a mini black swan, when the national library BigBookGiveaway gave away several beautiful pictorial books written for teenagers on some highly relevant topics. Those topics were exactly what I was unconsciously looking for. They scratched a big itch.

A less obviously but a bigger differentiator is the *hardcopy* print form — so much better than online including the videos. I kinda look forward to reading these books in my spare time. I will likely pencil mark, annotate and review them. For the first time, I felt relieved to have some promising resources to address part of my concerns.

— eg: LKY .. the books vs the videos.
I watched 30 – 60 videos of LKY’s talks, raning in length from 5 minutes to 2H. (I also watched some videotaped discussions over LKY’s legacy, but irrelevant here.) Content often overlaps.

There’s no table of content so I couldn’t pick a section. It was awkward to pause or rewind (like a book) so I seldom did.

There is often an introduction (uesless). There are often comments by a moderator or another guest on the stage, when I want to focus on LKY’s own words.

More seriously, there are words, perhaps one in a few hunrded used by LKY, that I want to but don’t understand. We routinely ignore them, since we don’t know the spelling. (No such issue with his Chinese talks.) Some of these unfamiliar words are LKY’s personal characterizations of a subject.

Then I picked up [[one man’s view of the world]]. The content is often similar to the talks, but the absorption rate is much higher. I underlined many key words or parapraphs for review.

The content is more organized, more comprehensive, more substantiated. With his talks, LKY often gives a brief answer. Many experienced speakers on stage would do that.

I also have a Chinese book. I will be able to compare the contents of the two books, something hard to do in videos.