At previous article I commented to you the fundamentals of Photoreading, the necessary steps to put it into practice and what open source programs we can use in Linux to apply it. Now we are going to describe each of the steps more extensively.
If you don't want to go back to the first article, I'll tell you that the Photo-reading is an accelerated learning technique that takes advantage of the brain's ability to rapidly process information unconsciously. To be useful we must then apply a series of actions that allow us to bring it to the surface.
It is a particularly recommended method for those who have difficulties with traditional learning methods. For those people who identify with this comment from the creator of the method. Paul Scheele:
As a child, my passion for learning manifested itself everywhere except in class. I learned mechanics by taking bicycles apart; electronics, fixing old radios; leadership on the playground, and music with my rock'n roll band. Even today I explore the world with the avidity of a child, and traditional education still seems incompatible with real learning.
Photo-reading with Free Software. Preparing to learn
Preparation
This stage has two components; planning and predisposition.
To start with the Photoreading we necessarily need set a goal. It is not the same to read a novel for pleasure than to discuss it in a book club. Nor is it necessary to prepare an exam in which we will not have access to the text to answer the questions that inform us of the content to know when it may be useful to us.
Setting the purpose allows us better organize the next stage (Pre-reading) eliminating what does not serve our purpose. It is not the same to want to deepen the content than to just have an idea of what it is about.
Continuing with the material part of the preparation stage, we must make sure that we have all the necessary material. This is the material in digital format and the software that we will use to work with it.
Photoreading was originally developed to be used with printed material. So you don't need to scan it to use the method on the computer. However, you may find it helpful to do so. In that case, a tool to consider is Gscan2pdf.
This program allows acquire the images directly from the scanner and convert them into pdf format.
gscan2pdf It is available in the repositories of the main Linux distributions or from the project page.
Another tool that can be useful for converting printed texts into electronic ones is Scans to pdf. We can find it both in the snap store as in the FlatPak repositories.
The program creates a reduced size pdf, but, in which you can search for texts since the compression to pdf is done in 3 layers; the text, the background and the optical character recognition.
Corrections may need to be made to scanned images. For those cases we can resort to programs such as The Gimp o Scan Tailor that are available in the repositories of our distribution.
Scheele argues, and I agree, that devoting a percentage of our attention to something helps to fix the rest on something else. Of course it has to be something that does not interest us enough to distract us from the main objective.
The author suggests using the so-called "tangerine technique" This is imagining that we pass a tangerine from one hand to the other and then balance it on the top of the head (He gives an explanation of why the procedure that makes it not sound so delusional)
Personally, I suggest listening during the study some kind of sound or ambient noise as we can find on Youtube or Spotify. Or use the Audacity noise generation tools. Audacity is available in the repositories and in the stores of Flatpak y Snap.
We just have to go to the menu Generate → Noise, choose the type of noise and set the duration. Then we save it in our preferred audio format.
It is recommended that once you have gathered the material you relax and spend a few minutes repeating what your goal is before moving on to the next stage.
In the next article we are going to comment on the previous reading stage.