Generally Thinking

Category: Study Skills

  • Growth mindset versus fixed mindset

    There’s two types of mindset that are relevant to studying – the fixed mindset, and the growth mindset. People with the growth mindset learn better and get better grades than people with a fixed mindset.

    What are they?

    A fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence (or any ability) is a fixed trait, that you’re born with and can’t do much to change. A growth mindset is the belief that intelligence can be developed. Why is this important? Because if you have a fixed mindset, then the results of an essay or other test are a reflection on your intelligence. People with fixed mindsets don’t want to risk finding out that their intelligence is low, so they give up easier.

    People with growth mindsets care little about the results of test, because they don’t see it as a reflection on themselves. They know they can learn and develop, so they take on more challenges rather than avoid them, and persist more, especially in the face of setbacks.

    What’s your belief about your intelligence? Do you think the grades you get on this course are a reflection of you? If you got a bad grade, would you think “I’ll be bad at this no matter what I do,” or, “If I try harder I’ll do better”? The research suggests that being in the latter group – having a growth mindset – will help you get better grades, and it’s also more rational, because you can develop your skills, especially your study skills.

    Watch this for more:

    And now the big question – how do you change from a fixed to a growth mindset? More on that soon (I’m not building suspense I just didn’t realise how late it was…).

    References:

    Here’s one paper, and here is Carol Dweck’s (the main researcher of mindset) page with lots of stuff.

  • Three quick but effective note taking tips

    Whether you write your notes in full paragraphs, i.e., blocks of writing, on each page, or you’re a bit more sophisticated and use bullet points, there’s probably something you can do to save time and prevent yourself from simply ‘scribing’ what the lecturer is saying (generally a bad idea). Here are a few quick ideas:

    1) I use Tim Ferris’s method of using a notebook, and writing an index in the front page. This is so much easier than using A4 sheets and punching them into folders afterwards, you never lose notes, and it’s massively easier to find the notes you need. Wish I’d heard of this years ago.

    2) I have used Cal Newport’s recommendation for subjects like psychology. He says to write the broad question that the lecturer is driving at on one side or in the margin, then the answer and evidence below it. This is really useful in some cases, but cumbersome in others. Sometimes the speaker jumps between ‘questions’, and it’s too slow to write out a question for each one. Although some lectures are practically designed for this method. This method makes notes infinitely more useful both afterwards and during lectures; you never think “Why the hell did I write that down?”, and by working out and writing down the underlying question behind what the lecturer is saying, it forces you to engage your brain right there. Which is something you should do anyway; if you just passively listen to the lecture and wait to leave, you’re simply burdening yourself further down the line with things you could have already done. Save time and do it in the lecture.

    3) Use keywords, not full sentences. When taking notes in the standard, linear way, don’t write out full sentences. It will only slow you down and make your notes less appealing to read later. Use bullet point lists wherever possible, and indent and space them nicely.

    Some people use a laptop too, which might also be useful; I can type much faster than I can write. But I’m also a big believer in not carrying things whenever I can help it, and notebooks weigh less than laptops (for now…).

  • Four ways to boost your creativity when writing

    Whether you’re writing a novel, a blog, or an essay, the biggest problem has to be writer’s block. It’s so annoying when you’ve actually gotten past the initial procrastination hurdle (not an easy task in itself), you’re sat at your desk and you WANT to write – but it’s just not coming out. Or, what is coming out isn’t to your liking.

    Trust me, I know how that feels; I started this blog post in 2005.

    Here are a few tips you can try to give your creativity a little boost.

    1) Get the right emotions for the job

    3342877736_374c327e7a_m
    Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

    Our emotions serve evolutionarily adapted purposes. We have different emotions because they each solve different evolutionary problems. Anger helps to stop people transgressing against us, love helps us keep a mate, fear keeps us out of danger, and so on. Because they are specialised, emotions have different effects on our perceptual system, and the ways we think. ‘Negative’ emotions tend to narrow our though-action repertoire, while ‘positive’ emotions tend to broaden them (Fredrickson, 2001 – PDF).

    In other words, when you’re in a lower mood, you’re more likely to look at the little details, when your mood is high, you’re see the bigger picture and be more creative.

    So whenever you’re brainstorming or coming up with new ideas, boost your mood with something uplifting, heart warming, or side-splitting.

    Whenever you’re editing or proof-reading, put some downbeat music on, and get to work.

    (We might also suppose that continuing a long argument with your spouse is a bad idea – you’re both focusing too much on the things that put you into that negative state. Sleep on it and discuss in the morning.)

    2) Take breaks

    Whenever you’re doing work that requires focused, mental effort, you’re draining your mental willpower reserves. Once these are depleted, performance suffers and you suddenly can’t be bothered to work. Take regular breaks and do something that requires no effort to attend to – spending time in nature has proven to be a useful exercise to this end (See the extensive work of the Kaplans). Also, make sure you don’t go hungry while working – the fuel that willpower runs on is glucose (Gailliot and Baumeister, 2007) – empty stomach equals poorer mental performance.

    3) Use novelty to your advantage

    Short answer: If you want a novel idea, expose your brain to novelty.

    Long answer: The area of the brain associated with novelty is thought to be the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA). The VTA is part of the dopamine system, in other words, the reward system. When we perceive novelty, our brain signals us to explore, because it is always looking for rewards. The brain likes novelty.

    What’s more, these brain areas are connected to the hippocampus, which is involved in learning. You can see where I’m going with this; enhanced learning might occur in the context of novelty. On top of that, a novel environment exposes you to a different set of priming, which themselves trigger different areas in your brain.

    There’s the science, here’s the simple advice – go somewhere new to write. Try a park, a library, a coffee shop you’ve never been to. Try a car park, a zoo, a big wheel, try wearing different clothes, talking to different people. Use novelty to your advantage and see if your brain doesn’t come up with some new ideas.

    4) Try the SCAMPER method

    Luciano Passuello of LiteMind discusses the SCAMPER method of creative problem solving. This is going to be more effective when you have a specific writing problem you are ‘stuck’ on. It is essentially a list of questions which help you to look at the problem from 7 different angles, each represented by the SCAMPER acronym. Not all of these angles will be appropriate to your specific writing problem, but I’ve found it really useful at various times. I’m interested to hear how you get on with this method, so let me know if you use it – leave a comment with your experiences!

    Get to it

    I’m certain that by using one or more or these techniques (all four if necessary) you’ll be able to make at least SOME headway on your writing. Let me know how you get on!

  • Useful, free speed reading tool

    I came across a very useful and free speed reading tool a couple of weeks ago:

    http://www.spreeder.com/

    The words appear in the middle of the screen at the rate you set, and you can paste in your own text to read. This is a great tool for ‘overclocking’ your reading speed: basically, you set the speed to just a little faster than you can comprehend, and then immediately move onto the book or paper that you want to study. You’ll find you read a little faster than normal after doing this. It’s a little like running with ankle weights or a heavy backpack, and then taking the weight off – you run a little faster.

    Set the font size to 10 or 12 so it’s comparable to things you will actually read. Also, set the chunk size to around 5, as you should try to get into the habit of looking at words in chunks and ‘jumping’ to the next chunk (these ‘jumps’ are technically known as saccades – it’s how we all read anyway you just need to find a way to jump along in the most efficient way).

    When you look at each chunk of text, don’t look directly at the first word. Look at the second. If you’ve been trained as a left-to-right reader, you’ll have a little peripheral vision to the left of the fixation point, and significantly more to the right of it. So even when reading a book, your fixation points should never be at the beginning and ends of each line, but a little in from the left and right margins.

    Overall I think Spreeder is a great way to train different speed reading skills in isolation – reading speed, concentration, comprehension, confidence, peripheral vision. Try setting the chunk size to 5 and speed to 400 words per minute. The average speed is 200-250 words, so if you can manage this you’ve probably almost doubled your reading speed.

    There are pros and cons to Spreeder though:

    Pros:

    • You can set your own reading speed
    • You can use your own text
    • Eliminates back-skipping completely (back-skipping is where you re-read something you’ve just read. It’s a bad reading habit as you’ll usually find you don’t gain much by going back, and you just need to be more confident that what you think you read is what you did read).
    • Very useful for skimming a text
    • You can alter chunk size to develop your peripheral vision

    Cons:

    • You are not reading a line of text as you would in a book, so the you’re not developing the right eye-tracking habits
    • Not great for active reading – only really useful for training and skimming
    • I prefer to spend as little time as I can staring at a screen


    Recommended Reading:

  • Between work and leisure – Escaping The Grey Zone

    A friend sent me an interesting text message the other day. He asked: “What’s your biggest time-waster?” I replied with only three mysterious words: “The Grey Zone”. In case you’re wondering, he said his biggest time-waster is figuring out what my cryptic texts mean.

    What is The Grey Zone?

    The Grey Zone is limbo. You’re somewhere in between relaxing fully, and actually being productive. You are sat in your work place, sort of doing little jobs that aren’t really important in between checking emails, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever. Or you’re watching a TV program but you bring a book to read as you watch it. This is The Grey Zone. You’re not making efficient or useful progress, and you’re not switching off completely and getting the benefits of leisure time either. After a while in the grey zone, you will feel guilty for not getting anything done but also tired as you have not been fully relaxing.

    It’s very easy to fall into the grey zone with tasks that have no clearly defined start and finish points. Studying is one big example, so is working on a blog or website. Yes, you know when your exam or essay deadline is, but you don’t have a schedule to do x at y time on z day. Without a start and finish point, it’s easy to spend hours or even days in the grey zone. You’ll eventually feel too overloaded with work to justify taking any time off (at least not without feeling guilty), so you feel compelled to sit at your desk “working”, but at the same time you don’t have the motivation to tackle any mentally demanding tasks. So you settle on some task that is necessary, and is helpful in some small degree, but isn’t what you would choose to do if your motivation was higher.

    The problem with the grey zone is that it’s easy to rationalise that you have spent this time working. You probably believe quite strongly that the more time you put into a task, the more you get done: the ‘results by volume’ approach. If I’ve spent 6 hours ‘working’, I must have done lots of work. The flaw in the logic is that not every hour’s work is made equal. Here’s an illustration, using an arbitrary points system. Say an hour of focused work is 10 points of productivity, an hour in the grey zone is 3 points of productivity, and an hour of leisure is 0 points of productivity.

    4 hours productive work = 40 points
    2 hours leisure time = 0 points
    TOTAL = 40 points

    2 hours productive work = 20 points
    4 hours in the grey zone = 12 points
    TOTAL = 32 points

    So more gets done in the first example. But there’s another factor to take into consideration. Even though 4 hours in the grey zone is less productive, it’s still pretty tiring. Without the extra time to relax, you might not be fully rested for tomorrow. Here’s what might happen the next day:

    4 hours productive work = 40 points
    2 hours leisure time = 0 points
    TOTAL = 40 points

    2 hours productive work = 18 points
    4 hours in the grey zone = 10 points
    TOTAL = 28 points

    Of course these figures don’t prove anything; I’m just using them to illustrate my points, which are:

    • The grey zone is easy to fall into without clear start and end points to your work periods (and knowing specifically what to do within these ‘time boxes’)
    • Overall productivity is lower in the grey zone
    • The grey zone drains your motivation to tackle work with focus

    Escaping The Grey Zone

    It’s easy to get into and hard to get out of – unless you know how.

    1) Fixed Scheduling

    This is an idea popularised by Cal Newport. The principle is simple – you set a fixed schedule to study, and once that time is up, you stop working and start your leisure time, however you might choose to spend it. This is a bit scary at first, you might think you need the time too much, but give this a try for a few weeks. You’ll find that you get as much or more done, for two main reasons. Firstly, you’re forced to be more productive in the time that you have, so your overall efficiency will improve. Secondly, you’ll be better rested the next day, and won’t feel the need to float around in the grey zone. But you must stop when your schedule tells you to! Then go relax and recharge for the next day. If you ignore your schedule, you’ll just keep your old pattern; and if your time runs out before you get the work you wanted done, it will remind you that you’ll need to be more focused the next day.

    2) Time Boxing

    I came across this one through Steve Pavlina, many moons ago. Within your fixed schedule, set specific blocks of time out to work on specific tasks. Buy a cheap academic diary for this purpose. For example, say you have a lecture between 2 and 5. Your schedule for that day might be to work in the library from 10-1.45, then go to your class until 5. Your time boxes might be a two hour session between 10-12, and another from 12-1.45. Time boxing is very useful when you can’t break a task down further and it’s now just a matter of putting the time into getting it done. You know you only have to do a certain amount of work, so you don’t feel overwhelmed.

    3) Planning

    Some people prefer to ‘go with the flow’ in terms of when and what they study, but I’m willing to bet that most people couldn’t do better on the fly than they could with a schedule. Therefore, you need to adopt some kind of system. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but you should know exactly what you need to do when you sit down to work. This doesn’t mean “Work on essay.” ‘Work on essay’ is not something to do, it’s a very vague notion. Instead, something like “Download Diener (1995), read and take notes.” Don’t put “Revise for working memory exam,” put “Draw mind maps based on notes on working memory.” It’s best to be as specific as you can so you don’t waste time in the grey zone deciding what to do. Although I accept there are times you cannot be any more specific than “Write essay” – sometimes it’s just time to start writing.

    Remember the key points. The results by volume approach to study makes intuitive sense but it’s not entirely accurate. The quality of the time you put in is also important, and if you’re spending a long time putting minimal effort in, it will produce worse results and more stress than if you spend shorter periods putting lots of effort in. It will be difficult at first – focused studying is a tiring thing to do. After a couple of hours you’ll get hungry as your brain eats up glucose to fuel your efforts. But it is something you get better at over time.

  • Using a Wiki to organise your notes

    There’s a recent post up at Cal Newport’s blog that’s very interesting. He discusses the study strategy of a man known only as Ricardo. His method is to using a wiki app installed on his iphone to type his notes onto. He then whips out his iPhone whenever he’s got a spare 10-15 minutes, and goes over the notes. The idea is that over long periods of time, these tiny chunks add up to a lot of study without any additional inconvenience.

    I used to do a similar thing with software that converted text files into audio. I would copy and paste journal papers into textpad, convert them to mp3, and listen to them as I travelled around. At one point I had a job which basically entailed walking around London (distributing flyers), and I essentially got paid to listen to papers and my notes. It sounded robotic but you could understand it.

    But using a wiki on-the-go is an excellent idea. If I had an iphone I would do it. However, I do use one for ordinary sitting-at-a-desk type studying. The one I use is called ZuluPad, and I’ve found it to be a really useful tool.

    ZuluPad has two features – writing text, and adding pages. That’s it. When you add a new page to the wiki, you give it a name. Anywhere else that that name appears in the wiki is automatically transformed into a link leading to that page. So, say a few weeks ago I write a page with notes on intrinsic motivation. If today I’m writing notes on the effects of meditation, and I put down some comments about how it links in with intrinsic motivation, I instantly get a link back to my notes on that.

    Compare this to the analogue paper and pen system. If I want to look up related notes in folders or notepads, I can index the notes as well as I want but it still requires getting the right folder or notebook out, going to the contents, checking the page number, flicking to the page. With ZuluPad, I don’t have to do anything I wouldn’t already do. I’m a big fan of simple programs that have zero learning curve, and ZuluPad is exactly that. Oh, and it’s completely free too.

    So give it a go for a while, see if you find it useful. By the way, I highly recommend Cal’s blog too – go and subscribe to it if you haven’t already. You won’t regret it.

    Note: I’m going to add study tips to the blog more regularly now. My aim is to put a post up every Sunday, though I’m not promising I won’t miss one here and there.

  • How to find elusive papers and books

    You may be familiar with this scenario. You’re doing an essay, or revising for an exam, and there’s one annoying paper or book that you just can’t seem to find. Before you shell out for a full price book or a pdf paper (pdfs can cost $20 each!), there are a few tricks that improve your chances of finding the elusive literature. Follow the steps below in the given order. They rarely fail. In fact I can think of only one time that I’ve had to buy a paper online, and even that was some rare FBI report on serial killers.

    Finding elusive journal papers

    1) Online Databases

    Start by searching the online databases you have access to through your university. If you have an ATHENS account, EBSCO is where you can find PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES. Check your universities intranet portal, if they have a useful papers section or something similar. Also register at Science Direct and check there. These should be your first ports of call.

    2) Google Scholar

    Search Google Scholar. Search for the full title of the paper first, and if that doesn’t work, just search for a snip of it that has no question marks or colons in it. Sometimes searching for the full title doesn’t bring up a paper that’s actually there, for some odd reason.

    3) Normal Google

    Search for the title of the paper in normal Google. Sometimes this will bring up a page hosting the paper, or the author’s personal website.

    4) Authors’ websites

    Google the names of each of the researchers in the paper. Check all their personal websites, just in case the Google search didn’t pick them up for some reason. If none of the authors have the paper available for download (sometimes, annoyingly, they just have a list of papers without download links), email the first author and ask if they have a pdf they could send you. Say your doing an essay and really need the paper for your assignment. Don’t write a seven page explanation of why you want it, and don’t be surprised if you get a reply with no content, just the paper as an attachment. They are not being rude, they just get about a million emails a day. The times I’ve had to do this I’ve always gotten prompt replies. If the first author can’t or won’t send you a copy, email the second author, and so on.

    5) Fellow students

    Email/ask your fellow students who are doing the same assignment if they have it. Ask the lecturer who is giving the class if they have it.

    6) Hard copies

    Check your universities holdings to see if they have a paper version of it. This is unlikely if it doesn’t show up in the online searches, but possible.

    7) Other universities

    Check other universities. Search their online catalogues first, to see if they have the journal you want. Obviously start with the closest one and move outwards. I don’t know about the US, but here in the UK there are schemes to allow you to access other libraries and get books out (SCONUL), and most will also allow you to join as a guest for the day (sometimes for a price).

    Finding elusive books

    1) University library

    Obviously, start with your university library.

    2) Google Books

    Search Google Books for it. If it’s on there, you are able to search inside the book, and you get a few preview pages. By using relevant search keywords, you can often bring up the few pages of the book that you need, get the info you want, and copy and paste a quote if necessary. Amazon‘s ‘Search Inside’ feature serves a similar purpose.

    3) Bookstores

    If you don’t need to read a whole book, go to a bookstore that will have it. At this point you’ll have to use some stealthy method to extract the information you want. If your phone has a good camera, you can photograph the pages, else you can copy out the quote you need into a text message and save it into your drafts. At the very least, you can read the section you want.

    4) Amazon/Ebay

    Check Amazon and Ebay. Can you get a used copy for just a few quid? If so, consider buying a copy. It might cost you the same as it would to travel to another university, so this is worth checking first. I once got a copy of Dan Dennett’s Elbow Room for less than £2. If you won’t need the book after the assignment, donate it to your university library when you’re done (do this whenever you have psychology books you no longer need – you will feel good inside, and the library staff will look kindly upon you, which is always useful).

    5) Other universities

    Check other universities’ libraries. As with journal papers, check the online catalogue before making the trip!

    6) Local libraries

    Look in large local libraries. This is a long-shot if the above methods haven’t worked, but if it’s a large one like the British Library, there’s a chance.

    These should do the trick. If you get an electronic version of a paper, make sure you keep it! Then if you need it again you won’t have to go through this whole process again. Make a folder called ‘Journal Papers’ and inside that have a folder for each particular field. Another big time saver is to write your references in a text file as you go along. With text edit on the mac you can ‘paste and match style’ (command+alt+shift+v), so that it’s pasted in the same font and font size.

    Also, you can google the name of the paper, not to find the paper itself but to find one in which it has been cited in APA format. Then copy from their reference list, paste and match style into your file, et voila – a full reference list in proper APA format, all commas and dots in the right places. EBSCO has a ‘cite this paper’ button at the bottom of each page that you can use for the same purpose.

  • Is time management important for students?

    In the first half of my degree, my focus was not entirely on my studies. Like many students I spent a lot of time socialising and drinking. So naturally, I failed to complete a few essays here and there. In atonement for this, I had to do extra work over the summer break, including some rather humorous makeup assignments. One was a 600 word essay on “The importance of time management skills for students in higher education”; which appears to be the higher education equivalent of writing lines (I found this hilarious).

    Anyway I came across this essay recently on my computer, and had a read through. It’s actually quite interesting, even if I do say so myself! The theme is university study, of course, but it should be pretty universal in terms of procrastination-related stress. Have a look.

    fingers on keyboard

    Students in higher education may have other activities and tasks to balance. In addition to academic responsibilities, there may also be paid or volunteer work, and other commitments to consider.

    If these demands are not managed effectively, the result will be inadequate time to complete projects, missed deadlines and the quality of the work may also suffer as a result. Time management relates to techniques or methods of scheduling time, which result in the efficient organisation of outstanding tasks in order to meet deadlines.

    “Procrastination is associated with increased susceptibility to cold and flu”

    Time management strategies can begin with breaking the outstanding projects into smaller tasks. Each task is then listed in order of priority, giving a list of smaller goals in place of a large task. These goals are then given deadlines for them to be achieved by. The result of this will be a plan covering the entire process of completing the project. When this plan is complete, the tasks should be completed sequentially and without skipping or leaving tasks partially completed.

    If time is not managed properly, it can become too simple to put off tasks and projects in favour of other activities; procrastination becomes most likely when there is the least time management.

    A study conducted in 2002 by Sirois and Pychyl found that students who procrastinate on the completion of academic work are prone to unhealthy diet, sleep and exercise patterns, digestive ailments, and higher susceptibility to cold and flu. Additionally, the study also reports that students who procrastinate are less likely to seek medical treatment for health problems (Glenn, 2002).

    Britton and Tesser completed a study in 1991 in which they intended to discover whether students who actively applied time management techniques in their education would achieve higher grades than those students who did not. Their results not only showed a relationship between effective time management and higher grades, but also other benefits.

    They found that students who applied time management techniques were more likely to say ‘no’ to unprofitable activities, feel they are in control of their time, and set goals for longer time periods than students who do not (Britton and Tesser, 1991)

    “Students who use more time management techniques tend to have higher GPA.”

    Macan et al. Conducted a similar study, they created a questionnaire which had a list of time management techniques such as setting goals, to-do lists etc. This data was correlated with their grade point average, and a self-reported assessment of how well they believed their studies to be progressing. The results of the research indicated that the students who scored higher on the list of time management techniques, were more likely to have a higher perception of their performance as a student and also have a higher Grade Point Average.

    The study also noted other benefits, participants perceiving themselves as having less ambiguity concerning their role, tension, were more satisfied with their lives and jobs where applicable (Macan et al. 1990). In cases where students do not apply any time management strategies, additional negative side effects can result. The quality of the work produced may suffer where less time is spent on it, and poor use of time is a major contributing factor to stress.

    The capacity to manage time in an efficient way is a skill, which is not only applicable in an academic environment but also in future careers or situations after graduation. Time management is employed deliberately by managers in many fields, and learning this skill before employment is useful in complying with strategies in use in future workplaces and if in management careers themselves. As such time management skills give a legitimate advantage when seeking employment.

    Unlike in studies, in these environments deadlines are often set daily and as such the environment is structured and suitable for time management methods. Students that can effectively manage time in a more unstructured environment will find time management much simpler in the workplace.

    References:

    Britton and Tesser (1991) Effects of Time-Management Practices on College Grades. Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol. 83 (3) pp. 405-410

    Glenn, D (2002) Procrastination in College Students Is a Marker for?Unhealthy Behaviors. Retrieved 12/01/06 from: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Resources/essays/procrastinate.html

    Macan et al (1990) College Students’ Time Management: Correlations With Academic Performance and Stress. Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol. 82 (4) pp. 760-768

    Image Credit: StuartPilbrow

  • Where to find good information online

    Are you sick of looking for information on a topic, but only finding the standard “Four Secrets Of….”, or “The Ten Best Ways To….” articles?  You know what I mean, they usually have about 3 sentences for each point, no depth, no meaningful commentary, just a few of the author’s unsubstantiated opinions puked onto a web page?  If you’re like me, you don’t just feel disappointed or let down, you feel…what’s the word?

    Used!

    “OK pal, great, you fooled me.  You got your God-damned page view.  Happy now?  Hmm?!”

    I throw my keyboard across the room every time it happens.  Thrown that damn keyboard about 500 times now.

    Don’t get me wrong.  Snippet articles can be good: they can be used as refreshers, the can have references and links to related good stuff.  They can even make good points by themselves.  But let’s be honest, maybe 75% of them are crap.

    “Good information can be hard to find…”

    This kind of comes with the internet.  Boundaries to publishing are lower, anyone can do it.  This gives us a huge knowledge base literally at our fingertips.  For example, my shower is quite weak, I wanted to know how to increase the pressure.  Ten years ago I’d have to ask around, maybe visit a DIY shop for answers.  Yesterday, I found out in about 11 seconds.

    But this has downsides.  Lowering entry requirements generally lowers quality.  Well, it lowers average quality; the good stuff is still there, it’s just harder to find.  For example, my shower is still weak.

    As boundaries are lower only in cyberspace, some of the highest quality sources of information are outside of the web.  Books, journals, magazines.  College courses, university degrees.  Experts’ brains.

    If only there were some way to get this type of information onto the web, in an easily digestible format!  Of course, that’s the primary purpose of the site you’re reading now; but luckily I’m not the only one with this goal.

    In fact, there are sites which get information, often cutting-edge, up onto the web in the YouTube generation’s favourite format: video.

    People have been recording university lectures and posting them up for a while now, although I’ve only just become aware of this.  The sound quality of these videos range from absolutely crisp to barely coherent, but the content is usually going to be good stuff.  Plus, there are other clever sites with good information.

    Here are the ones I’ve looked at so far:

    TED

    TED is made of talks – up to 20 minutes long – given by experts in all kinds of fields, focused on Technology, Entertainment and Design.  See their about page for more details on why they do this.

    Really, really good site: short and digestible talks, good video and sound quality, and big name speakers.  If you haven’t seen it already, you’re in for a treat.

    Some of my favourites:

    Vilayanur Ramachandran on Your Mind

    Barry Schwartz on The Paradox of Choice

    Martin Seligman on Positive Psychology

    Richard Dawkins on Our Queer Universe

    Academic Earth

    Academic Earth‘s mission is to make a world-class education available to everyone with internet access, by getting courses and lectures from leading scholars up on their site and available for free.  You can browse by topic or by university, with the big names like Harvard, Princeton and MIT up there.

    There are 1500 videos up at the time I write this, although some subjects covered more comprehensively than others (psychology only has a few up, but they’re good introduction ones).   Many of the lectures are grouped into courses, and they are all downloadable.  Also, by registering, you can save your favourites for easy access next time.

    Big Think

    In Big Think you’ll find various experts giving their big thoughts on specific questions.  It’s not quite as in-depth as the sites above, from what I’ve seen so far, but still very interesting.

    Experts range through many fields, from academics, to celebrities, to journalists and so on.  Maybe you’d like to see Dan Dennett explain the mechanics of studying consciousness, or maybe you’d prefer Ricky Gervais’s take on animal rights instead.  Of course you can search by category or by expert, to find what you like.

    I haven’t tried this, but you’re able to suggest questions for the experts, and new experts to ask the questions to by email.  There also appears to be a big community section to the site, which again I’m not really interested in, but you might be.

    Good for getting some basic ideas or perspectives on different topics, and probably a better way to spend time than strange YouTube videos!

    iTunes U

    iTunes U is a section of iTunes, where you can get over 100,000 educational audio and video files, coming from universities, museums, and other institutions.

    Of course, you’ll need iTunes to access this, but even if you prefer to use some other media playing program, it’s worth getting iTunes just for this.  The information is all in the iTunes store – but don’t worry, it’s downloadable for free.  You can search by category or institution.  This is easily the largest resource of the four.  There really is a staggering amount of information on here.

    That’s it!  If you’re like me you’ll like these sites.  You don’t get to ask questions or speak to the lecturer after the class, but you do get to rewind and fast-forward as you like.  I don’t watch TV (something I highly recommend), because I prefer to watch more constrictive things; these sites are one way to do this.

    All four are a great way to look for expert opinions on subjects for which there is little information on the web, or where the information is of lower quality than you might like.

    Plus they’ve saved me a fortune on keyboards. 🙂