This Simple Method Helps You Learn More from Podcasts (and Audiobooks!)
Summary
TLDRThe video script emphasizes the importance of active listening to podcasts for effective learning. It suggests starting with a pre-listen knowledge activation by jotting down what you already know about the topic. The host recommends listening in one-hour segments, followed by free recall exercises to reinforce memory and comprehension. This method helps in reducing mind-wandering and deepens material processing. The script also encourages seeking clarification on unclear points and connecting new information with prior knowledge, potentially using multiple podcasts for a broader perspective.
Takeaways
- 🎧 Podcasts are a great resource for learning, but to maximize their educational value, active engagement is necessary.
- 📚 Unlike reading, podcasts don't allow for easy control over the pace of information intake, which can affect comprehension.
- 🚗 Multitasking while listening to podcasts can lead to a lack of focus and reduced learning effectiveness.
- 📝 Activating prior knowledge by writing down what you already know about a topic can enhance understanding of new information.
- 🧠 Listening to podcasts in focused, one-hour increments can help maintain concentration and reduce mind-wandering.
- 🔍 Free recall exercises after each listening session can reinforce memory and improve retention of the material.
- 🤔 Pre-listening to a podcast with the intent to recall later can change how you listen, making you more attentive and engaged.
- 🔗 Making connections between the podcast content and other knowledge can aid in sense-making and deeper understanding.
- 🔎 Looking up unfamiliar terms or concepts during recall exercises can clarify understanding and fill knowledge gaps.
- 📊 Organizing the podcast content into a cohesive structure or diagram can help visualize and solidify your learning.
- 📅 Scheduling future recall sessions can reinforce long-term memory and provide an ongoing test of your understanding.
Q & A
Why might podcasts be considered more challenging to learn from compared to books?
-Podcasts are considered more challenging to learn from because you have less control over the pace of information, and you often listen to them while doing other tasks, which can lead to a lack of focus and comprehension.
What is the speaker's suggestion for enhancing learning from podcasts?
-The speaker suggests taking control of the learning process by listening to podcasts in focused, one-hour chunks, followed by free recall exercises to reinforce and organize the information.
How does the speaker recommend preparing before listening to a podcast episode?
-The speaker recommends writing down what you already know about the podcast's topic to activate your prior knowledge and set the right mindset for understanding new material.
What is a 'free recall exercise' as mentioned in the script?
-A 'free recall exercise' is a technique where you write down everything you can remember from a podcast episode without referring back to the content, which helps in reinforcing and organizing the learned material.
Why does the speaker emphasize the importance of reducing fade-in/fade-out moments while listening to podcasts?
-The speaker emphasizes reducing fade-in/fade-out moments to maintain focus and minimize the chances of missing important information, thus enhancing the learning experience.
What benefits does the speaker associate with doing pre-recall exercises before listening to a podcast?
-Pre-recall exercises make you listen more attentively and process the material more deeply, as you are aware that you will be tested on the content, which creates a learning benefit.
How does the speaker suggest dealing with unclear points or unfamiliar terms encountered during a podcast?
-The speaker suggests looking up unclear points or unfamiliar terms after a free recall session to ensure a good understanding before proceeding with the next part of the podcast.
What is the purpose of organizing and understanding the material after a free recall session?
-The purpose is to make sense of the information, create connections, and bind the learned content with what is yet to be heard, which aids in comprehensive learning.
Why might the speaker recommend creating a cohesive picture or pictures reflecting your understanding after a podcast?
-Creating a cohesive picture helps integrate the learned material into a structured form, which aids in long-term retention and provides a visual summary of the content.
What additional strategy does the speaker propose for deepening the understanding of a podcast's topic?
-The speaker proposes listening to another podcast on the same era but from a different perspective to gain a more comprehensive understanding and see connections that might be missed from a single source.
How does the speaker encourage engagement and sharing of ideas from the audience?
-The speaker encourages audience engagement by inviting them to share their ideas for learning from podcasts in the comments section, fostering a community of learners.
Outlines
🎧 Enhancing Podcast Learning Through Active Engagement
The paragraph discusses the challenges of learning from podcasts compared to books, such as the lack of control over the pace of information and the tendency to listen while doing other tasks, which can lead to a lack of focus. The speaker introduces a technique to enhance learning: before listening to a podcast episode, write down what you already know about the topic to activate prior knowledge. Then, listen in one-hour chunks and follow up with a free recall exercise to test your memory and understanding. This approach helps to minimize distractions and deepens the processing of the material. The example used is the 'Twilight of the Aesir' episode from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast, which is about the Vikings.
📚 Solidifying Knowledge with Free Recall and Multi-Perspective Listening
This paragraph continues the discussion on effective podcast learning by emphasizing the importance of free recall exercises after each listening session to reinforce understanding and connect new information with what is about to be heard. The speaker suggests creating a cohesive picture of the material using memory and recall materials to fill gaps in understanding. Additionally, scheduling a recall session after a few months can further strengthen learning. To gain a broader perspective, the speaker recommends listening to other podcasts on the same era from different viewpoints, which can reveal connections and insights that a single podcast might not provide. The paragraph concludes with an invitation for viewers to share their own podcast learning strategies in the comments.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Podcast
💡Learning Technique
💡Pace Control
💡Multitasking
💡Free Recall Exercise
💡Sense-Making
💡Testing Effect
💡Perspective
💡Hardcore History Podcast
💡Vikings
💡Cohesive Picture
Highlights
Podcasts can be challenging to learn from compared to books due to less control over the pace of information.
Good readers naturally adjust their reading speed based on the difficulty of the material.
Podcasts are often listened to while multitasking, which can lead to a lack of focus and reduced learning.
Activating prior knowledge about a topic before listening to a podcast can enhance understanding.
Listening to a podcast in one-hour chunks with a free recall exercise afterward can improve retention.
Free recall exercises before listening can change the way you process the material, leading to deeper learning.
Allowing the mind to wander during recall exercises can help make connections and enhance understanding.
Recall exercises are not just about regurgitating information but about making sense of it.
Looking up unclear points or terms during a podcast can solidify understanding.
Binding the recalled information to the next part of the podcast aids in the learning process.
Creating a cohesive picture of the material using recall exercises can reinforce learning.
Scheduling a recall session months later can test and reinforce long-term memory.
Listening to multiple podcasts on the same topic from different perspectives can provide a more comprehensive understanding.
Engaging in a sense-making process during recall exercises can lead to new questions and a desire to learn more.
The presenter encourages viewers to share their own methods for learning from podcasts in the comments.
Transcripts
Podcasts are awesome, but if you just listen to them and you don't do anything else,
you're probably not learning as much as you could from them. In this video,
I show you a simple technique to learn a lot more from the podcasts that you love.
I think podcasts are a little bit more difficult to learn from than a book. One reason is that you
can control the pace at which you read. Good readers do this naturally as they are reading
so when things get easier to understand they'll probably speed up a little bit and when things
get a little harder they'll slow down. But with a podcast you are less in control of the speed at
which information is coming at you. Now, I guess you could set the podcast speed to go a little
faster or a little slower, but that doesn't occur naturally as you are listening to the
podcast. But another important drawback to using podcasts and audiobooks to help learn something
is how we listen to them. Often people listen to podcasts when they're doing something else,
right? They're driving. They're doing the dishes. They're folding laundry. They're at the gym.
Because we are doing two things at once, it's easy for our mind to wander and to zone in and
out of awareness of what the podcaster is saying. Sometimes, you might not even be aware that you
missed 20 seconds or 30 seconds somewhere. So what's my approach to learning from them? Well,
I want to show you with an example of me learning from a popular history podcast that you may have
heard of. And if you've seen my video on how to learn from YouTube videos, some of this is going
to sound kind of familiar. Right now, I'm going to listen to the episode Twilight of the Aesir by
Dan Carlin on his Hardcore History Podcast. It's a four-hour episode on the Vikings and presumably
the disappearance of the Vikings. And so I already know what the topic is about. Since I already know
what the broad topic is before I listen to it at all, I take a few minutes to just write down what
I know about the topic on a piece of paper. And you can use a blank text file or really any kind
of medium you want to use where you just take a few minutes to write down - like what do I know
about Vikings? Anything? The purpose of this is to activate my prior knowledge about the Viking era,
so even if I don't know that much about it - which I don't - I'm at least putting myself in the right
frame of mind to understand the new material and when I go to listen, I either just listen
and don't do anything else at all, or I will try to do the least demanding task possible because
I want to reduce those fade-in/fade-out moments as much as possible. I'm going to listen to it in
roughly one hour chunks. So I'll listen to the first hour now and then I'll do a free recall
exercise after that first hour. Okay, so now I'm back. I just listened to the first hour earlier
today and now I'm gonna do a free recall exercise kind of like what we did in the beginning. So I'm
just going to get out a blank sheet of paper I'm going to try to remember everything that I
can. One of the advantages of doing free recall exercises like this happens before you even sit
down to listen to the podcast. If you know you are going to be tested on something - which is
what these pre-recall exercises are by the way, they are self tests - you listen differently. You
pay more attention and you process the material more deeply. This is one of several kinds of
testing effects because knowing there is a test in the future creates a learning benefit right now.
When I'm doing this, I'm letting my mind wander a bit. It's perfectly okay to bring in other topics
and to go on tangents and these things. If you can relate what you're learning about Vikings to other
things, that's really great. Perhaps this goes without saying but I'm going to say it anyhow:
as we are doing this - as we are doing these free recall exercises - we are trying to make sense of
the material. It's not just a word vomiting session. It is a sense-making exercise. For
instance, Dan Carlin, in the podcast, talks about various reasons that Viking attacks increased in
the late 700s and early 800s but this happens over the course of, I don't know, maybe 45
minutes of discussion. What I've done here is to distill those reasons and organize them in a way
that makes sense to me. After I do a free recall session I will have some things that maybe I am
not that clear on or some words or names that I don't quite remember what they were. For instance,
Dan Carlin references Jutland many times in the podcast and I just didn't know: is that all of
Denmark is that a little tiny piece of it? I don't know let's look it up I didn't exactly know where
the Saxons were living at this time or really where they originally came from. I didn't know
that, so I looked it up. Once I'm satisfied that I have a pretty good understanding of what has
gone on so far, then I can keep listening to the next hour or so and usually when I am engaged in
this sense-making process I end up with questions - open questions that the podcast hasn't answered
yet. Maybe the podcast is never going to answer. But a lot of times these are questions that make
me want to learn more. Ao doing this free-recall exercise is about organizing and understanding
what I heard, but it's also about binding what I heard - that one hour that I heard before - to
what I am about to hear - the next hour or the next hours that I'm going to listen to. As you
might guess we are going to do the same kind of thing after every hour and we're going to
see how my understanding progresses. So now I'm done with the podcast I'm going to show you the
results of my free recall exercise that I did at the end of each hour of listening.
[Music] Doing what I just described alone can be quite helpful but if you really want to go
the extra mile, you can bring all of this material into a cohesive picture or pictures that reflect
your understanding. If you do this, start off by just relying on your own memory first before you
go back and you use your free recall materials or other references to fill in the gaps. You can
also schedule a free recall session a couple of months from now and that will be another way of
testing and reinforcing what you've learned. And, if you want to get really crazy you could
download another podcast talking about the same era but from a different perspective. So if you
had another podcast talking about England or France during this time period, and so you had a
perspective of the French during this time period, a perspective of the Vikings from this time
period, a perspective of the English from this time period... Then you would really start to see
some of the connections that maybe you wouldn't see just from listening to one perspective. So
that's it for me, but I want to hear from you what are other ideas that you have for learning
from podcasts? Write them down in the comments and I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.
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