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by MojoJolo 3150 days ago
This is interesting and very applicable. But will this work with some online lessons that includes visuals like presentations / minor viz?
2 comments

Not op but I do these same things and the answer is a pretty solid “no”. I have tried so much haha.

For thay reason, this approach is limited but highly valuable. I’ll explain how I do it.

Most programming material acn’t be learned this way, but programming podcasts are good for learning about what to learn and for learning methodoloy! I have been listening to the ‘Test & Code’ podcast lately and, especially for a novice Python programmer, this podcast has a lot of this type of knowledge.

I try to avoid podcasts of news and gossip because I do enough of that and more efficiently on HN.

Lectures interspersed with visuals are basically not doable. You’ll find yourself interrupted and distracted from the central activity (commuting, chores) and you lose flow.

Probably the best use I have found for this is for spending time in “hobby topics”. This lets me sort of outsource the effort I spend with my hobby topics to when i am doing other things, preventing the hobby topics from intruding on productivity.

I love media theory, history and philosophy and these things can be discussed with no visuals, and there are many great lectures and academic courses available. This stuff often even informs the creative areas of my job.

My favorite hobby topic is art history but having to stop what I’m doing to reference a visual work is too distracting :(.

As gt says, it depends a lot on the subject. I’m very interested in biological anthropology for example and here it works fine. Sometimes I have to go back to video versions of the lectures.

Generally speaking, except for aubjects such as history I don’t think it can be used as the sole approach to learning, but many cases I think it can be a useful part. You’ll need to hear things more than once anyway!