Informention

Touch Typing Progress!

poezn — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:42:51 +0000

Last post I reported about my experiment to improve my typing skills by relearning touch typing.

After only 5 days, my skills already improved significantly, as the following chart shows. Honestly, I wouldn’t have expected such a vast progress after only 30 minutes training each day.

(R)e-Learning Touch Typing

poezn — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:54:27 +0000

Back in the mid 90′s, children didn’t start using computers at age 2. Touch typing wasn’t an inborn ability and had to be acquired in a painstaking learning process. For that reason, my high school was smart enough and had us visiting a mandatory class to learn touch typing. Luckily, due to my nerdy childhood, I had spent lots of time in front of a computer screen and was therefore able to type fast enough despite my not-so-sophisticated system using 4 and a half fingers. Of course, our wacky touch typing teacher was not amused, but I passed every test, so there was nothing he could do against my reluctance to learn a proper system. I won the battle; or so I thought.

The keyboard is probably the tool I use most often, and being able to type fast is a vital skill in my everyday professional and private life. The only problem is–I can’t really type. Of course, I’m fast enough, but the fact that I’m not able to type without looking at the keyboard says a lot about my actual skills. That sucks. Wouldn’t it be much more enjoyable to be able to take notes during a presentation or lecture while actually looking at the person talking to you? What if I tried?

One of my academic interests is in the e-learning field. On one hand I’m convinced that tool based learning is a good way to acquire a mechanistic task such as touch typing. On the other hand, after using a “wrong” system for more than 20 years, is it possible at all to relearn something that is as deep seated? This week I decided to give it a shot. Due to the fact that I’m mostly using US-English keyboard layouts, I even determined that if I had to go through the whole process of rewiring my neurons towards using all ten fingers, I wanted to take that opportunity and learn it with the keyboard I’m mostly working on since I moved here from Switzerland.

There are a bunch of tools out there that guide you through the process of (re)learning touch typing step-by-step. Tipp10 is a nice desktop application for both Windows and Mac. I really liked the slick user interface. However, although you can choose your keyboard layout, the lessons are tailored for a German layout. Similarly to Tipp10, a lot of web applications provide lesson based learning, which is great if you don’t use the same computer all the time. I compared a few of them and stuck to the Typing Web Typing Tutor. It’s free to use if you are willing to distract your focus by a lot of annoying ads, $10 otherwise.

Typing tutor provides some nice beginners, intermediate, and expert set of lessons that build on top of each other. One starts with the home row (The letters in the middle of your keyboard). With each lesson, some more and more letters are being added.

Time will show how useful this exercise is. In order to have an evaluation metric, I did a typing test using my old technique and got the following result:

Characters: 1311
Errors: 60 (95,4% accuracy)
Characters/min: 265
Words/min: 41

The bar is set.

My newly acquired ability made me apply it on this very blog post. While it is encouraging to see that I actually use all of my fingers, it took me way ridiculously long to type it. I’m trying try to see that it as an incentive to improve.

Twitter, Teletext and The Media Industry

poezn — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:05:54 +0000

A critique on Twitter in progressive Das Magazin, one of my favorite Swiss news publications, revealed that many journalists unfortunately still seem to struggle with the changes in the media industry. I really like Das Magazin and was even more disappointed, which eventually made me draft a comment. At least, thanks to the article and Wikipedia, the term Apologist has expanded into my vocabulary. Thanks a lot, Das Magazin.

It’s fairly bold to dismiss the subtle decline of the media industry as an error. The decreasing number of readers is a fact. Why a whole industry seems to make Twitter accountable for the decline, appears incomprehensible to me. Twitter is neither the bearer of the bad news, nor can the platform be regarded as being the Messiah to or–even worse–as a replacement for the print media industry.

An often heard argument is that the 140 characters that Twitter allows for a single tweet erode the quality of a story, which is a very banal attempt to explain the usefulness of the platform. Twitter is not about reducing the deepened analysis of a subject to 140 characters. Instead, I use Twitter as a news ticker for both friend’s personal “news” and news in the narrower sense.

In Switzerland, Teletext has been highly popular for the past two decades. One line Teletext headlines allow a maximum length of 30 characters. An interested reader has to enter a 3 digit page number to get more in-depth information, fitted into a television screen on a maximum of maybe three or four paragraphs. While Teletext has been regarded as a high quality news platform, many people still ridicule Twitter as being overly shallow, which seems fishy, to say the least.

As a consumer for high quality news I’m more than worried when I watch how a majority of the news industry deals with new technological innovations. Instead of objectively participating in the dispute on and experimenting with new initiatives like Twitter, one can watch lampooning articles and columns heaping up. Could this be based on the underlying disappointment of media workers that once again a technology didn’t turn out to be the savior of the industry?