Most of these studies seems to concentrate on two factors: “speed” and “learning time”; two issues that perhaps is important if you are a corporation paying to have typists trained. Nowhere does “comfort” seem to be an item.

For me, the proof of the proverbial pudding is in the eating: My primary reason to switch was to stop the hurting in my finger joints when typing. The slowest component of the system still seem to be sitting in front of the keyboard.

Full disclosure: Yes, I am the author of an “alternative layout” which is posted on my website in case anyone else can benefit from it, but I couldn’t care if you rather preferred the Inner Mongolian keyboard layout. Really.

Though anecdotal evidence never has been considered scientific proof of anything.

“Numerous studies conducted by physiotherapists on reconditioning in similar tasks suggest that rate of development begins to slow within 3 months. An additional 20% functional increase in performance occurs between 6 months and 2 years, while the bulk of results are gained in the first 3 months.”

interesting…
mostly that sounds like you are comparing apples and oranges.

I would expect such studies would be focused on answering questions about various therapies to regain function of diseased or injured muscles. If mental deficits are involved due to things like a stroke then another host of questions arise about the nature of neural repair if any is occurring (some studies show recruitment of nearby undamaged reasons in some cases), the extent of the initial damage, etc.

Development due to recovery from injury is a different topic than skill acquisition of a healthy individual. I think that would take some careful reading and much discussion to decide if any of those studies were really relevant.

Yes, I did some looking as you suggested. I was not impressed.

and by the way, the monkeys are doing highly structured and repetitive tasks. Your comment indicates a deep ignorance of decades of research literature, which would be perfectly fine except for the somewhat typically immature combative persona you’ve taken that’s all too common on the internet.

Ok, we get it. You love Qwerty for it’s all around mediocrity.

To clarify on my personal experience (which should have no relevance to the issue at hand), I started touch typing when I started college. I got up to 60WPM in QWERTY within 6 weeks, and to 80WPM within 12 weeks and stopped practicing. After that my speed kept increasing at a decreasing rate as I learned new shortcuts, until I reached 95-100WPM. Then it stopped increasing completely. A few years later, I decided to try Dvorak. I got to 80WPM within 3 months and stopped practicing. My speed increased gradually over the next 9 months and stopped at 100WPM as well. With Colemak, I hit 60WPM after a month and my progress hit a wall. I only got up to 80wpm after continuously practicing over the next 6 months. Then it stopped completely.

A few months later, I gave up on Colemak and it was a good decision for me. I also learned a completely new way of typing on QWERTY, using non-standard hand positioning and I surpassed my Colemak speed within 30 days. I reached 100WPM 90 days after quitting Colemak. I recently started practicing on a typing-test site where I scored 120WPM.

In my situation, Colemak was the slowest layout.

-WRONG: That is precisely the case in this type of reconditioning. You’re the one making unwarranted and incompatible comparisons.

“You could have simply been stuck on a plateau and depending on how you were training because how effectively you were training yourself is a factor, a month or two down the line small factors could have coalesced and you could have experienced a sudden jump in speed. It’s IMO by no means clear what your ultimate speed on Colemak is without taking the experiment out over a two year period.”

-WRONG: Not only is this highly speculative, it also goes against the anecdotal evidence given by users on the colemak forum. It also missed the entire point Jammy was trying to make - whether alternative layouts are worth this trouble.

“Two years is consistent effective training in a complex motor task is actually what it takes to reach a high level of skill.”

-WRONG: Unfounded generalization. Numerous studies conducted by physiotherapists on reconditioning in similar tasks suggest that rate of development begins to slow within 3 months. An additional 20% functional increase in performance occurs between 6 months and 2 years, while the bulk of results are gained in the first 3 months.

3 months of NO discernable gains for Jammy cannot simply be explained away as hitting a “plateau.” Much more likely, and supported by emperical evidence and experimental research in the field, it suggests that Jammy has reached his peak. The “other 20%” will be a gradual process of specialization, but it is not guaranteed to happen. My guess would be that his specialization in QWERTY methods will limit his gains for years, without any guarantees that he’ll benefit from any of the claimed advantages of alternative layouts. Obviously, Jammy doesn’t find that to be a worthwhile endeavor to pursue.

“It’s also actually very common to see someone persist and experience significant jumps in performance 6 months later.”

-WRONG: It’s NOT common for someone to experience significant jumps in performance after exhibiting the same symptoms Jammy showed. Where are you getting these bogus statistics? It’s actually common for someone to experience significant gains within the first 6 WEEKS to 3 months. After performance has leveled off, there are INsignificant jumps in performance as the subject starts specializing.

“IMO 4 and half months is little better than 4 and half days. Neither is far enough in learning a complex motor task to a high level of skill.”

-LOL. 4.5 months is FAR DIFFERENT from 4.5 days. In the area of touch typing, a significant proportion (>80%) reach a high level of skill within 3 months. At that point, they achieve roughly 70-85% of their eventual speed.

Regarding your second comment - your comparisons are wholly invalid. Training monkeys to do some odd skill vs. training a human to do a highly repetitive and structured task….and you call yourself a “hard core experimental biologist”???

But, your monkey story was at least somewhat entertaining, although completely irrelevant.

I would post links to numerous sources to back up everything I have written but there is a limit on links per comment and it’s also pretty easy for someone to search through academic journals to find the relevant info.

HTH

“The reality is that humans are VERY adaptable.” This is true and a reason that well trained children with the motivation can pick up the various tricks as you mention to increase speed. It’s also true that later in life many seem to experience RSI or “cumulative trauma disorder” and many seem to find relief from alternative layouts (anecdotal as far as I know).

There are however limits to adapting as you age though recently we have come to realize that older adults are much more adaptable than the old dogma suggested. It certainly is not as easy as you get older. I never learned to touch type as a kid, that was a separate class for those wishing to learn secretarial skills. We used slide rules.

Not considering myself a programmer (unless you count FORTRAN 77/C, object oriented languages make my head hurt), and being more of a hard core experimental biologist, I’ll grant you my experience is more with monkeys and invertebrates. Since I consider humans just another cousin of chimpanzees I think I am on safe ground here. When we train macaques, it usually take about 6 months for them to gain high degree of skill at the task (generally after 6 months they far out perform naive humans). Bear in mind these are simple motor tasks, successfully executed result in the thirsty monkeys getting a sip of water or dilute juice. They train nearly every day and for the most are highly motivated to work at it for hours (you know it when they quit working). On simple skills you see general rise in ability over the first 6 months. Typical lab protocols call for 6 months of training because generally the ability is sufficient by that time to begin the experiments, baring being unlucky and getting a much below average monkey that has trouble learning even simple skills in time frame.

Now, an important point, you have to be careful in designing experiments. If you get too ambitious with the tasks, you can end up with training times longer than a year for the monkeys to gain competency. And you do see Monkeys that start getting stuck on plateaus with no obvious improvement for months as complexity of the task increases. This can be a very bad thing if your grant is coming up for renewal.

Mastery of high level motor skills do not IMO come in a few months of training. From what I have read, 90 wpm or above certainly qualifies as a high level for touch typists of any layout. Hitting 70 wpm quickly for Colemak when formerly a Qwerty touch typists doesn’t seem surprisingly because of the gross relation of the skills, but I am not surprised that reaching the highest levels takes learning movement tricks that differ between the two layouts.

Someone hitting 100wpm after years of training (I assume you started as a child under 16) and training in multiple layouts to 100wpm and then going back to Qwerty and training to 120 wpm after 9 more months has just proved the rule that something under 6 months is likely not sufficient for most people.

Meanwhile, I quite happily and comfortably type away using Colemak on my notebook computer keyboard at 3x the speed I was typing. Colemak was novel enough to get me take a wack at touch typing again. baa baa…

Actually FlapJack makes one or two very good points. It’s probably killing a sacred cow or two to say this, but some of the optimisations that alternative keyboard layout designers make aren’t all that beneficial. My biggest bugbear is actually with the optimisation that you’d probably naturally think of as the most prominent one — the focus on the home row. On a conventional flat keyboard, it is actually a rather bad idea.

In case you don’t believe me, just try this little experiment. Sit down with a laptop (or another flat keyboard) and, keeping your fingers, hands and wrists as relaxed as possible, rest your hands on the keyboard, with your index fingers on the F and J keys (T and N on Colemak). Don’t aim the other fingers for the rest of the home row though. Chances are that your hands will come to rest on QWEF and JIOP (Colemak: QWFT and NUY;) rather than on the home row themselves. If you then move all your fingers onto the home row, you will notice that your wrists are forced inwards and it is noticeably less relaxed.

This is why split ergonomic keyboards are designed the way they are — and why I found Colemak OK for text with my Microsoft Natural 4000 but I don’t like it at all on my laptop. Incidentally, the first time I tried Colemak I was only using it on my old laptop at home in the evenings and after only a couple of weeks I found it so uncomfortable that I had to give up on it.

Switching between layouts seems to be a quite individual experience. Your 100-100-80-120 progression doesn’t sound unlikely but others have reported very different results. It depends on a bunch of factors and no new situation will be the same as a previous one. If you’re having more fun with QWERTY then good luck with that; I’m having more fun with Colemak so I’ll stick with it. My QWERTY speed was never as high as yours; maybe that’s one of the most important factors in this. And maybe it’s something else entirely; who knows?

P.S.: Did Craig get any basic biology wrong? I couldn’t spot any mistakes.

To claim that colemak is more efficient based on “distance travelled by fingers” or “home row usage” or “low same-finger-keypresses” or some other arbitrary factor is ludicrous. That’s like trying to prove the Reimann hypothesis using sticks and stones, and used bubblegum wrappers.

One of the major advantages of QWERTY is that typing with it can be done effectively using only 6 or 7 fingers - pinkies not needed. Can’t do that with a more “balanced” layout like Colemak/Dvorak.

Another major advantage that gets downplayed is the staggered columns - QWERTY users can make VERY good use of alternate fingering techniques. Again, can’t do that with a layout like Colemak/Dvorak that shuts out these “shortcuts” due to the lower same-finger keypresses or a more “balanced” workload.

A third major advantage of QWERTY is that a lot of the most common digraphs/trigraphs/suffixes/prefixes found in the most common english words are near to, or next to each other in superblocks - “ASDWERT”, “YIOUL”.

A fourth major advantage of QWERTY is the high same hand typing of letters. Colemak replicates that, but Dvorak doesn’t, which is also why a substantial amount of effort is required of the Dvorak typist in learning to coordinate the hands in proper sequence.

What the alternate layouts do have is the ability to simplify typing for those who are not capable of learning and taking advantage of QWERTY’s “hidden secrets” by allowing all the fingers to participate in a more balanced manner and keep a better rhythm.

Distance traveled by fingers have almost no bearing on speed or comfort for those who have the aptitude to master QWERTY. Neither do most of the other “features” given as advantages over QWERTY. If that were the case, then QWERTY typists would be upto 50% slower, with broken wrists compared to those on alternative layouts. But that is simply not the reality.

The reality is that humans are VERY adaptable. Give them any serviceable layout and they’ll be able to type more or less at the same speed with enough practice. QWERTY has gotten a bad rap by people who don’t understand (or don’t take the time to understand) the mechanics behind touch typing.

Most of the fastest QWERTY typists achieve their speed by specializing their typing habits to take advantage of the strengths of QWERTY. It is therefore not at all surprising that JammyCakes, a highly specialized typist, was unable to retrain his typing habits to adopt a more balanced and rhythmic typing style in just 5 months.

On a more personal note, I was a QWERTY touch typist for 10 years. My typing speed was just shy of 100WPM. On Dvorak, I achieved 100WPM after 1 years. On Colemak, I achieved 80WPM after 1 year. Now, I’m back to QWERTY because typing is actually FUN with QWERTY.

Oh yeah, and the best part?… I just achieved 120WPM after 9 months on QWERTY.

PS - Craig KBS aka “Neuroscientist” - umm…please learn BASIC biology first, yeah? I can pretend to be “uber-hacker Neo” on the intarweb too….sheesh.

“After a while it tails off asymptotically and once the curve flattens out, you can generally conclude that without expending a good deal of effort on it, it won’t increase any further,”

You could have simply been stuck on a plateau and depending on how you were training because how effectively you were training yourself is a factor, a month or two down the line small factors could have coalesced and you could have experienced a sudden jump in speed. It’s IMO by no means clear what your ultimate speed on Colemak is without taking the experiment out over a two year period.

Two years is consistent effective training in a complex motor task is actually what it takes to reach a high level of skill. That’s not what we want to hear in our hurry up, I got to be a master now modern world but it’s the actual reality for the average person. From personal experience and teaching, have seen the effects of plateau’s in learning, I have seen it music training and more complex martial arts that require timing and precision motor tasks. Complex dance and speaking language as well experience plateaus in learning because of the involvement of brain areas involved in motor planning.

It’s actually very common to see someone quit on a plateau in learning when no obvious progress is being made. It’s also actually very common to see someone persist and experience significant jumps in performance 6 months later. This doesn’t negate your job related reasons for needing to go back to Qwerty. It just means that the idea that you were on some kind of absolute asymptote after a few months is really more just a rationalization. Cognitive dissonance if actually real could really cut multiple ways here and the problem for one who decides to stop barking down one road is really have they gone far enough and do they have reliable data to know what is far enough. IMO 4 and half months is little better than 4 and half days. Neither is far enough in learning a complex motor task to a high level of skill.