Terms!!! and other stuff

I have finally found a book that uses my term "visual intelligence" in the same way that I use! This may seem like the tiniest revelation but because I've been struggling with this since the beginning it is a HUGE step forward for me. It also means that when I'm doing my writing I don't have to write in words that I know will be replaced later.

I am currently working on the thesis presentation. I have the structure laid out and I am in the midst of creating the visuals. The visuals will be able to translate into the book as well because they will all be discussing the same subjects. Once the thesis presentation is done I will be expanding it to create the full seminar. I have yet to figure out the technology that goes behind posting the video of the seminar with voice-over onto the website but I think one thing at a time is the best approach.

I am also making some nice head-way on the book. I am hoping to create the majority of the visuals myself but some of the imagery may be stock photography. I feel that it would be beneficial to have a mix of both. The hand-made visuals will be best for some portions and I think that full-colour images will suit other parts better. That decision will however have to wait until the book is completed.

Alan Kay shares powerful ideas about ideas

This is once again from TED.com. I know it seems like this is the only resource I use but it is one of the best places to find passionate people who are experts in their field and who, let's face it, make great presentations. So, here is another one. This one talks about the new ways of educating through interactivity and visuals. Which is what I've been saying the whole time but it's nice to hear it from someone else but it means that I am on the right track.

Deliverables

I'm struggling with deliverables right now. I have decided to switch the workbook out for a different form of media. The replacement will be a website. It will be a place to place all portions of my thesis and will make it more available to the public.

I'm currently struggling with the book. I feel like it's starting to defeat me. I'm not quite sure what if any of the research should be included in the book itself or if it should be limited simply to my theory, visual thinking exercises, and then my forecast of how I would like to see the information used.

I'm also still struggling with how to make visuals for concepts that are sort of abstract. I will be continuing to explore these things in hopes of finding solutions that I feel do the project justice.

Play and the right brain: Have I come to another crossroads?

Once again I have have come across something that could change the outcome of my thesis. I'm still playing around with the idea (no pun intended) and once my thoughts on it have solidified it may be integrated into the final pieces.

Currently I have three outcomes for my thesis with one basic goal: education. My thesis is to educate people about visual intelligence and its importance. This includes helping people engage their own visual intelligence, through visual thinking, to strengthen it. By strengthening it they will be able to integrate it into their current ways of thinking, acting, working, etc. Often using more than one way of thinking can enhance the solution and outcomes even if it means exhausting other possibilities so that you are sure of your original solution. 

Out of pure interest I was watching a lecture filmed a the Serious Play Conference held in Pasedena, California in May 2008. The lecture was given by Stuart Brown on Why Play is Vital -- At Any Age. He discusses the biological implications of play and why it is important for us in areas such as problem solving. There was however a very specific point he made that started me thinking about its importance to my project. 

He was talking about a mother and baby and how they interact and play with each other. If they were hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), which records the firing of neurons in the brain, that the right side of their brain would "become attuned." The right side of a typical brain houses your visual centers and as well as your spatial centers and is often associated with imagination. 

Taking this into account, would it be useful to use play as a method of helping people tap into their visual centers and their right brains?

To view the whole lecture (which I highly encourage) watch the video below.

Elizabeth Gilbert - Nurturing Creativity

I know that this time of year can be very stressful for students so, for the creatives out there I've put up this video so that maybe you can take her advice and let some of the weight of the world slide off you and continue to show up for work.

Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Genius

I felt like my blog had been lacking in the video department lately so when I came across this little gem I figured I should put it up. This is one of the best accounts I've ever heard about how the right and left brain works and from the most unique perspective you could ever think of.

The Mentalist

Inspiration can come form very strange places. Watching the Mentalist he was describing his technique for counting cards (the reason behind this really isn't pertinent to the story). He was describing that to count cards he had each card memorized as a living thing. He described the 2 of diamonds as a duck smoking a cigar and the Jack of hearts as a ballet dancer with horns. The actual images don't really matter but by associating them with objects or scenarios he was able to see them more clearly. He then described placing each of these living things in a palace. A palace was something he was able to walk through in his mind. Each room had a theme.

By creating an elaborate visual code of sorts he was able to easily able to recall where in the deck cards were and which cards were missing by being able to walk through the rooms. This is exactly how people who have strong visual intelligence describe how they think. They will "place things on shelves" as in the case of one of Linda Kreger Silverman's students. 

This would be one of the most valuable skills that could be taught to children with visual intelligence. It is a way to help them organize the information they are being given and to hep them recall it for later use. 

Creating a very basic exercise to to show them how it works and how they can use it would be invaluable. Some of them may think that way to begin with but teaching it to them and helping them refine it could mean that they start to enhance their comprehension of material earlier and keep that information longer. It can be applied to many different areas of study.

Right now it's food for thought until I figure out exactly how to execute the exercise.

Daniel Pink: Living on the Right Side of Your Brain

I came cross a special today about Daniel Pink's theory of right-brain thinking. He is considered an expert in the field (although himself a left brian thinker) and talks about what he believes are the three main differences between right and left brain thinkers.

Left Hemisphere:

- sequential

- text oriented

- analysis the details

Right Hemisphere:

- all at once

- context oriented

- synthesizes the big picture

He then goes on to talk about what he considers the six abilities that are the most important for our future. These six abilities being: design, storytelling, symphony (pattern recognition), empathy, and play. He believes that these skills are going to be essential to our progress and these are the skills that most right brain people posses and the skills that left brain thinkers should start to learn. 

Click here for a link to the video. It's about an hour and fifteen minutes so make sure you have some time.

New Questions

This post is going to begin with a very short story that happened to me recently. I have a grandmother whom I see when I have time and she began to ask me questions about my thesis. Now I have talked to her about this before but as she is aging (like any normal 88ish year old) it is evident that her mind is beginning to deteriorate slightly. But upon answering her questions about my thesis (again) she made a remark that got me to thinking. During the conversation about how we learn and think she remarked that her learning/intelligence style actually changed with age. When she was younger she said that she had been a mostly visual learner but that as she aged she became a more auditory learner. This was very curious to me as her eyes are much better than her ears and I would have thought the reverse. Either way it led me to wonder about whether this is something that should perhaps make its way into my thesis project. It is certainly relevant that her learning style changed over time but is this relevant for everyone? If so, is it something I should be addressing in my final piece?

I have been doing a lot of reading lately about the brain and its incredible ability to adapt. It is a very new theory of how the brain works and how we might begin re-mapping. This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity.  This is a phrase that is slowly becoming more prominent in the world of neuroscience. It very basically means that with the right training we can re-map our brain to do (or not do) certain tasks or behaviors. Essentially with the proper training we can change how our brains work and not just in the formative years but even into our 70s or 80s. With the right training it can even train our brain to function like it did 10 or 25 years previous.*

I'm still exploring this avenue. It may make it into the final pieces and it may not, but in the mean-time I think it is best not to be limiting the influx of information. The determination of what will get included and what won't will come at a later date. I suspect that not everything will make it into the final thesis presentation because 8 months is not nearly enough time to fully explore this topic. It will earn a place in my personal work for years to come until I feel satisfied with the outcome. It may even eventually lead into some sort of Masters work or it may simply continue as an avenue of personal interest but I can firmly say that the final thesis presentation will not be the last of my work on visual intelligence.

*For more information check out The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Science From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doige M.D.

How to Adapt the sLab Presentation for the Business Seminar

I've been thinking about how to adapt the presentation I gave on Friday to be more conducive to a business audience. Originally my intentions were to use the same material I presented on Friday as part of the final presentation but I have since decided that perhaps more changes should be made than I had originally anticipated. For the business seminar I think it is still valuable to keep all the exercises I conducted but scrap the rest.

Although I think that for the purposes of the education seminar it was valuable to go through a brief history of written communication I'm not sure if that is best left in for the business seminar. Having an interactive component such as the exercises I provided are very valuable and showing some of the very basic tools that can be used for visual thinking is also important. 

The business presentation will focus on visual thinking and visual learning strategies that can be  applied in the office to create more effective and dynamic solutions for their business problems. 

Should there be some sort of take-away element to this? For example IDEO uses a number of interesting techniques to find solutions that are now available in the form of "Method Cards". These cards outline strategies that can be used to help see the problem from a different angle and come up with better solutions based on these exercises or "methods". This is much the same idea except that it is visual. Much like their Method Cards it does not require any special training or background simply an introduction to the concepts so that they can applied in their future work. 

I still believe however that a seminar is the best way to approach this because it will force them to get involved, which will help re-enforce the concepts. Re-enforcement is a great way to help people learn. 

Based on these conclusions I think it would be best to keep the exercises for now (and possibly expand the repertoire of exercises) and include more of my own work. That would probably mean starting with an introduction about my theory of visual intelligence, tying in visual intelligence to visual thinking, and then demonstrating visual thinking through exercises and examples. I don't want the presentation itself to be too long-winded or I will begin to lose my audience but having them get involved will keep their interest for longer periods of time.

sLab Future of Learning Presentation

As some may know last Friday I gave a small presentation on visual learning and visual thinking to a small seminar on the Future of Learning in sLab on Friday. I came in to talk about my research and work in visual learning and visual thinking. I used it as a sort of testing ground for some of the elements that would appear in the final seminar for my thesis.

I had a lot of interesting feedback from the seminar. Along with a very quick and very brief visual history of written communication I created a few exercises to help get the group involved. 

The first exercise the group was asked to "Draw the thing I [described] to [them]." I explained to them that I was going to describe them something like I had never seen it before and wouldn't have the vocabulary to describe. The intention of this exercise was to get them to realize that using words can't always help people understand what you are talking about. Anytime there is a drastically new discovery it is often difficult to describe to someone because the vocabulary does not yet exist.

I gave them 6 "clues" but I did not project them on the screen. In classrooms students are often left to their own devices. Professors will not always provide notes or slides and may not even provide visuals. This obviously can depend on the instructor but I was laying it out a little bit like a worst case scenario. I had slides but the slide itself did not necessarily give the most important information of the exercise. 

The "clues":

1) It is long and thin

2) Cell-like structures make up its outer encasing

3) Four structures hold it up

4) It has fin-like pieces at its front end

5) There are triangular shapes in its front cavity 

6) There are two windows on its front

The answer:

This exercise garnered a lot of constructive criticism. The major problems that people were having with this was the wording on the slide and the lack of some elements in the instructions. Not having said specifically that it was an object that they would be familiar with left some of the participants feeling lost. Most people caught on to that based on my previous statements and proceeded to attempt to guess the thing I was describing. 

The other major point they brought up was that they thought the word object was limiting. Some thought that meant it could not be a living thing. I tried to veer away from the word object for that very reason but apparently thing is not far enough away from object. I will have to find another word that will encompass both objects and living things as I do not want to immediately give away what it is based on the language. It was suggested to me that I eliminate the word altogether and instead say "Draw what I describe to you" but I'm not sure yet if that is too ambiguous. 

The second exercise I ran was as follows:

I told them that I was looking for visual answers and that there were no wrong answers. After the few minutes I had everyone show their answers and talk to them about how you didn't have to be an amazing artist to use visual thinking. It required only the use of very basic shapes and that using these very basic shapes you could make a multitude of objects without great artistic skill. This exercise also came under scrutiny.

The main issue with this exercise was the mathematic phraseology. Instead of interpreting the equation liberally many took it to mean that you could only combine the two and that other operations were off limits. Therefore they were less likely to subtract one shape out of the other. Some were reluctant to use the square or the circle more than once because they were strictly adhering to the mathematical phrasing. Strangely enough even after saying that the answers would be visual and not numbers or words I still got a few answers in the form of numbers. One person counted the number of corners and came up with 4. Another person counted the number of lines or segments and cam up with 5. This mathematical phrasing became an issue and blocked many of the possible solutions that might have been the outcome.

It was suggested to me that instead of simply using square + circle that I might also put up square - circle, and put of the image of the square and the circle and write underneath it the word combine. I don't know if using the word combine might again be misinterpreted as addition. The other issue I have with using words is that I was trying to demonstrate to them that they could create and infinite amount of objects using simple visual language. Even symbols such as +, -, and = make up a simple visual language. Using words to help them understand the language.

Some of the participants actually allowed me to take home their solutions so I will be posting their results (anonymously) in a later post. This will allow you to see some of the actual solutions that came about from the presentation.

I would actually be quite interested to see how the results would change when it was presented to children. Would the results be any different, would they have the same problems with wording or would they be able to navigate the exercises more easily? Unless I actually come across the opportunity to do that kind of testing I may never know. However, I will be making some necessary changes to the presentation to begin to adapt it more thoroughly to my thesis work.

After the group exercises I left them with an example of a product that already integrates images with words to help teach language. This product is Rosetta Stone. I highly recommend trying the demo to see how it works for yourself. It is a very interesting way of learning a new language and quite effective.

Image of Chinese dragon found at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Metal_dragon_side_view.jpg