We are getting an AMAZING set of presentation proposals for the world’s first massively open online conference for educators focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and more. We've already started accepting presentations, which we're doing in the order they were submitted. Submit one! Proposals can made between now and September 1, 2013. If your organization involved in STEMx endeavors, and encourage you to become a conference partner (it's free, and comes with some benefits!). We are also looking for global advisory board members who can help publicize the conference in their local areas. More information on the conference site.
A lot of published material on visual learning dedicates reams of paper explaining the ‘left brain –right brain’ theory. Apparently, our language skills (verbal and text) align to the left side (logical) of the brain, while pictures align to the right side (creative) of the brain. As per visual learning, an academic concept explained through a combination of visuals and text activate both the sides of the human brain, and thus allow better comprehension, as opposed to understanding the same concept in text alone, which apparently activates only the left side of the brain.
Even though the scientific credentials of this theory, as of now, aren’t well established enough to make it part of any standard school curriculum for science, it is an interesting metaphor to approach visual learning.
The info graphic summarises the key characteristics of this theory:
However, this topic spawns an interesting argument: Which academic subjects taught in schools can accommodate visual learning?
Much to the chagrin of any visual learning advocate, our education and learning system is heavily focused on text, even though we are born as visual creatures (another scientific study claims that of all the senses, vision utilises the most of our mental faculty). Linear text/verbal explanations ¬have an advantage over pure visuals, as in they have a well-defined structure in terms of language (which has well-defined usage rules known as ‘grammar’). As a result, we rely heavily on text when it comes to explaining a problem (yes, the exam question papers), and explaining the solution (why else is the word limit specified). While the benefits of text cannot be denied, most explanations are more vivid with visuals and text, than with text alone. A visual activates a different part of the brain, or to put it less metaphorically, brings a perspective that text alone cannot capture. Thus, using text and visuals together is strongly advocated for effective teaching and learning.
Even though the merits for visual learning are in plenty, this harmony of visuals and text is not as widespread as it should be. Students are still saddled with volumes of books that have voluminous levels of text, with occasional pictures added as if as an afterthought. Some moot points that may engender fruitful discussion on visual learning are:
We are all natural visual learners
Humans are visual creatures. It is our innate ability to see that helps us go through everyday life, and is the first tool for assessment for a given problem. If we are to map our thought process, the closest abstraction would be a multi-dimensional and dynamic visual. Even a child’s thought process is far too complicated to be abstracted through linear text. However, our verbal heavy teaching environment still makes us believe that writing our thoughts is the best way to give them shape – hence the phrase ‘chain of thought’. What we don’t realise is that while reading through text also, we tend to draw a mental picture to determine the underlying form of the concept explained through the text. Exploring and adopting visual learning will reduce this processing and make the concept more intuitive to grasp. The visuals needed for an effective explanation can vary in their richness – pictures, 3D models, animations, etc. Such visuals, when accompanied by verbal explanation (to set the context and provide detailed narration), provide the most vivid explanation which demystifies the underlying complexity of most academic subjects. Many e-education solutions excel in making lively and intuitive visual explanations of academic concepts, which aids a student’s understanding in a manner that linear text cannot. Hence, awareness of visual learning solutions is essential for a thorough engagement of a student’s mental faculty, especially during the growing-up years.
Visual learning is for everyone – even the students comfortable with text alone
One of the common interpretations of the ‘left brain-right brain’ theory is that right-brained people are creative, while left-brained are logical. It is often assumed that only children with artistic ambitions, or the ones having difficulty with linear learning, need to explore the visual learning – the others are better off with ‘traditional’ learning methods. While tendencies in one’s thinking process being logical versus holistic, does seem to have merit, as far as ‘creativity’ is concerned, in today’s knowledge driven environment, innovation is not an option, but a necessity. The primary aim of education should be to make an individual sufficiently skilled to deal with real-life problems, wade through uncertainties and come up with innovative solutions. So even students who are comfortable with the textual format for their education shouldn’t ignore what visual learning has to offer. Also, the adoption of visual learning won’t lead one to abandon linear text (that’s probably not possible in the foreseeable future), but only enhance the ability to learn.
Rules favoured ‘text’, but digitalization favours ‘visuals’
Generations of text-oriented learning has also affected the overall maturity pertaining to rules and technology related to text. We have strong rules in place in the form of grammar, and the foible of bad handwriting is getting more pardonable with electronic typing. On the other hand, visual thinking as a discipline is yet to gain any universally acknowledged structure and or set of rules. This has inhibited the adoption and advancement of visual learning. However, since the last decade or so, the advent of digital technology in education sector is changing things for good – students have access to variety of eLearning solutions, and have gained awareness of revolutionary teaching and learning methods through internet. Even schools are adopting technology like never before to keep pace on latest developments in education science and provide a competitive environment to students.
An increased awareness about visual learning in mainstream education sector can inspire educationalists to develop innovative education solutions (the potential is limitless) – which can indeed allow this long neglected learning discipline to take its rightful place as harbinger of the education and learning revolution.
Quimps, Plewds, And Grawlixes: The Secret Language Of Comic Strips
YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF A BLURGIT OR A SWALLOOP OR A GRAWLIX OR AN AGITRON, BUT YOU SEE THEM EVERY DAY IN YOUR NEWSPAPER’S COMICS SECTION. HERE’S A PRIMER ON THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF COMIC SYMBOLS.
When you think about it, the real world doesn’t have much to do with your favorite newspaper’s comic section.
If you were a cartoon character, canaries would erupt from your cracked skull and fly around in circles every time you hit your head. When you swore, your curse words would censor themselves as a long, seemingly random series of nonverbal iconography. If you didn’t bathe, visible smell waves would waft off of you. And every time you said anything, it would result in words actually burbling up to hang in a cloud above you.
That’s not what happens in real life, obviously. But if you look beyond the simple linework and frozen-in-time gags, the comics section is really the part of every newspaper that is dedicated to the language of cartoon symbology. In both importance and scope, there’s a lot more to the design of the comics section than you might realize.
In 1980, Mort Walker--the creator of comic strips like Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois--published a charming book titled The Lexicon of Comicana. Barely 96 pages, mostly cartoons and white space, The Lexicon was Walker’s own silly attempt to classify the symbols used in comic strips around the world. But the book ended up doing far more than that. To this day, it’s studied in art schools around the world, not just as a textbook but as a treatise explaining why the funnies matter.
Born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri, Mort Walker has been an insanely prolific cartoonist for almost 75 years. He had his first comic gag published at the age of 11. By 14, Walker was a pro cartoonist, selling gag cartoons to a number of boy-friendly pulps like Flying Aces and Inside Detective. By 15, he was cranking out a weekly strip for the Kansas City Journal; by 18, he was the chief editorial designer for Hallmark Cards. And this is just what Walker accomplished before he created his most famous comic creation,Beetle Bailey, in 1950.
If you asked Walker, he’d probably say there was nothing special about him being so precocious at such a young age. "Every child is a cartoonist," he writes in The Lexicon. "We all begin by drawing crude symbols of people and houses and trees. No one ever starts out as a Rembrandt. But Rembrandt started out as a cartoonist."
Walker might joke that what made him so wonderfully suited to being a career cartoonist is the fact that he never grew up. Even today, at 89, Walker makes his living by "drawing crude symbols" of people, and houses, and things. Not a lot of people would claim that Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois are sophisticated examples of the cartooning art. But they are, and after reading The Lexicon, it’s almost impossible not to have an almost idolatrous appreciation for Walker’s comic strips, when before they might have seemed clichéd and woefully behind the times.
As a reader, The Lexicon of Comicana's principal charm is that it lays out a series of cartooning phenomena that you’ve probably never thought too hard about, gives them funny, onomatopoeic names, and then lays out examples of how your favorite comic strip might use them.
For example, there’s the emanata. Emanata, The Lexicon explains, are symbols that emanate outwards from cartoon characters to show their internal state. Many emanata are unclassified by Walker (for example, hearts bubbling out of a character’s head to show that he’s fallen in love), but of the varieties identified by The Lexicon, there are some real winners.
If you’ve ever read Cathy or a Japanese manga, you’ll already be familiar with plewds, the drops of sweat that spray outwards from a cartoon character under emotional distress. The more plewds a character has, the more upset he or she is: There’s a big difference between the two plewds a comic strip character might show if he ripped the backside off his trousers and the eight he might have if he was skydived naked into the middle of a conference of clergymen.
If you like to tie one on, The Lexicon can afford you a useful grammar of cartoon drunkenness. If Leroy Lockhorn stumbles home with just a couple of tiny squeans above his head in the comics, he’s unlikely to get walloped: he’s just a little bit tipsy. If that squean is accompanied by a spurl, though, he’s loaded, and Loretta’s likely to bring a rolling pin down on his head. (As a personal note, after reading The Lexicon for the first time, I adopted the words "squeanish" and "spurlish" to describe my own relative state of inebriation. They’re very useful.)
In a section of the book devoted to lines cartoonists use to show motion, Walker coins some more great terminologies. For example, any line used to show something moving is called a sphericasia. Shake something hard enough and these lines are called agitrons, while the lines that show which way a comic strip character is pointing are called digitrons. And when Sarge punches Beetle Bailey in the comics, the punch is made up of three distinct elements: A little dust cloud called a briffit to show where the punch started, a swalloop to show the arc of the fist as it smashes across Beetle’s jaw, and the terminating point at the end, which is a whitope.
Speaking of briffits, they are most often found in the comic strips in the accompaniment of hites: horizontal lines streaking between a cartoon character and his briffit to represent speed. "The more hites, the more speed," Walker explains. But there are also vites and dites. As their names imply, these are vertical and diagonal hites, but they don’t show speed. Instead, they show that an object is reflective. There are also uphites and downhites, which come out of a character when he is jumping or falling.
A related line species to the vite is the solrad, which is a line emanating from an object to show that something--like a lightbulb or the sun--is bright. The solrad is similar but not identical to the neoflect, which are the lines that bounce away from something like a diamond ring or automobile in a comic strip to show us that it’s brand new. There’s also the indotherm, a squiggly line that might drift out of a cup of coffee to show that it’s hot. Or how about the delightfully named waftatron, which is the wisp of stream that comes from a cartoon pie to show that it smells good?
The Lexicon also will draw your attention to some surreal examples of comic strip symbology that you probably never noticed before. For example, have you ever heard of a lucaflect? Whether a door knob, a freshly shined pair of shoes, or a bald head, the lucaflect is the symbol cartoonists use to show something is round, wet, or shiny. What’s really curious about the lucaflect, though, is that it’s usually drawn as a four-pane window reflected in the object. Quips Walker: "It doesn’t matter if a window is nowhere near. You will probably never be questioned about it. If you are, clam up and only give your rank, name and serial number. . .or go out and rent a window."
There’s even a science to word balloons. Walker likes to refer to them as fumetti, which is Italian for "balloon." There are many different types of fumetti, though. For example, there’s the regular word "balloon," which is meant to convey something being said in a normal speaking voice. But what if Snoopy is the one talking? Well, Snoopy can’t talk, of course--that would be absurd--but he can have an internal monologue using a cumulus fumetti, which allows the reader to hear his thoughts.
What if your favorite comic strip character is on the phone? Then you use the "AT&T fumetti"--visually, a sort of static-y, crackly word balloon with fuzzily scrawled words hovering in the middle --to show that the voice is being relayed electronically. There are other types of word balloons, too. "The Frigidaire fumetti," writes Walker, "conveys a cold-shouldered snub," and is principally illustrated by showing actual icicles hanging off the balloon. But for yelling, you use the 'Boom!' fumetti, where the edges of the balloon are drawn in spikes. "The volume is determined by the size of the serrations," The Lexicon explains.
Comics even have their own fascinating symbology for obscenity. "Even in today’s permissive society many four letter words are not permissible in the comics," Walker wryly explains. Comic characters, therefore, are expected to self-censor themselves by speaking in the bizarre iconography of maladicta. The maladicta is made up of jarns, quimps, nittles, and grawlixes. What’s the difference? Quimps are mostly astrological symbols, jarns are usually different types of spirals, nittles are bursting stars, and grawlixes are squiggly lines that represent "ostensibly obliterated epithets." Naturally, they can all be mixed and matched according to the level of profanity a cartoonist wants: Stubbing your toe and dropping an anvil on your foot would result in some very different combinations.
This is all a lot of fun, ofcourse, and at the end of the day, the grammar, taxonomy, and classification of cartoon symbols with which The Lexicon of Comicana concerns itself might seem like a bunch of tongue-in-cheek silliness. That’s because it is! After all, Walker was a born cartoonist, and he has spent his entire life trying to get people to crack a small smile every day when open their newspapers.
But something can be silly and still be important. To Walker, understanding the design language of the comics was important. Cartooning is usually one of the first means of written expression a child learns, and for Walker, understanding the language of cartooning was the key to communicating with other people in an increasingly international world.
"Cartoon symbols are being used more and more throughout the world to bridge international language behaviors," Walker writes. "The more international we become, the more we need symbols and the more important it becomes that they are universally understood… We must take heart, then, when we see people in remote parts of the Earth reading Blondie and Peanuts and Donald Duck. Not only are they being entertained but they are educating themselves in the world language of symbols."
Dilapidated Detroit building becomes haven for learning
By Emma Ockerman Special to the Detroit Free Press
Room by room.
That’s how Horatio Williams knew he would have to approach transforming the desolate and shuttered Wayne County Medical Society building just off of I-375 in Detroit into a place where youths can learn, play and grow.
There was water damage and exposed piping. But flaws aside, the building, at 1010 Antietam housed a kitchen, a banquet hall and an auditorium, and the space necessary for the Horatio Williams Foundation to continue its education, music, and dance programs. With a vision in mind, Williams purchased the building for $275,000 in February 2011.
“Once you see it, it’s a hidden jewel in the middle of the city,” Williams said.
With the aid of a $1.1-million investment from UAW-Ford, Williams was able to move his offices and programs from space on East Jefferson. He hosted an open house for the newly renovated Horatio Williams Foundation Center on June 13.
“I was raised up in a facility like that, it was called the Eastside Center. It was a safe haven for the neighborhood. We wanted to get out of our houses because we had nothing to do,” said Williams, who played basketball at Tuskegee University before a car accident ended his college career. “The building reminded me of that. They can come here and get something to eat and be mentored, or just sit down and we can talk to them.”
Outside on the manicured lawn, a gaggle of laughing children engage in a game of Frisbee, tackling one another in a fit of giggles.
Inside, Williams, 46, walks the polished halls donning Nike sneakers, sweat pants and a shirt that reads “I’m kind of a big deal.” Upon entering the dance studio, he immediately receives a hug from a young girl after commenting on her chassé. Passing by the tutoring rooms, he is greeted with smiles.
Cianna Cooper, 11, has been a part of the foundation’s programs for two years. Her favorite part: learning to play the clarinet.
“My goal is to get a lot better at the clarinet,” Cooper said, looking back to the classroom she had just left. “We just finished a word game, making as many words as we could out of the letters on the board in a couple of minutes.”
For 13-year-old Matika Hill, it was the dance programs that drew her to the program, where she was referred by herteacher. “I like that we can meet new people and get a chance to perform,” Hill said. “I have more training, they actually work with us. In school, they don’t explain as much as the tutoring does here.”
Fit with new floors, new roof, windows, doors, and carpet, the center is now complete. Williams said he’s grateful to Marty Malloy, vice president of labor affairs for Ford, and Jimmy Settles, vice president of the UAW, for sharing his vision.
“Everything he could humanly do, him and his friends did it themselves. He didn’t just sit back in a chair and look at people getting it done. It made the company feel like it was a worthwhile investment, and definitely made me feel like it was one,” Settles said.
The center has aided students with a tutoring program, dance and music classes, as well as helping to raise some students ACT scores by as much as five points.
“With an education, I see their confidence levels up,” Williams said. “If a kid can’t read or write, what do you do?”
Lailah Alquarelles, 10, and D’Ajonay Jones, 14, paint story puppets Thursday during arts and crafts class at the Horatio Williams Foundation in Detroit. The center also has dance and music classes and a tutoring program. PHOTOS BY JARRAD HENDERSON/DFP
Tayla Turner, 10, of Detroit plays her horn during music class Thursday at the Horatio Williams Foundation. PHOTOS BY JARRAD HENDERSON/DFP
FOR MORE INFO
Horatio Williams Foundation Center, 1010 Antietam, Detroit, www.horatio williamsfoundation.org
Horatio Williams, 46, of Detroit bought the building for the foundation in 2011 and is in the process of renovating the Detroit spot after getting a $1.1-million investment from UAW and Ford.
Founder Horatio Williams shows off the brand-new kitchen Thursday at the center. He hopes to begin offering culinary training to students in the future. “Once you see it, it’s a hidden jewel in the middle of the city,” Williams said of the new location.
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. By definition, Strengths (S) and Weaknesses (W) are considered to be internal factors over which you have some measure of control. Also, by definition, Opportunities (O) and Threats (T) are considered to be external factors over which you have essentially no control.
SWOT Analysis is the most renowned tool for audit and analysis of the overall strategic position of the business and its environment. Its key purpose is to identify the strategies that will create a firm specific business model that will best align an organization’s resources and capabilities to the requirements of the environment in which the firm operates. In other words, it is the foundation for evaluating the internal potential and limitations and the probable/likely opportunities and threats from the external environment. It views all positive and negative factors inside and outside the firm that affect the success. A consistent study of the environment in which the firm operates helps in forecasting/predicting the changing trends and also helps in including them in the decision-making process of the organization.
An overview of the four factors (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) is given below-
Strengths - Strengths are the qualities that enable us to accomplish the organization’s mission. These are the basis on which continued success can be made and continued/sustained. Strengths can be either tangible or intangible. These are what you are well-versed in or what you have expertise in, the traits and qualities your employees possess (individually and as a team) and the distinct features that give your organization its consistency. Strengths are the beneficial aspects of the organization or the capabilities of an organization, which includes human competencies, process capabilities, financial resources, products and services, customer goodwill and brand loyalty. Examples of organizational strengths are huge financial resources, broad product line, no debt, committed employees, etc.
Weaknesses - Weaknesses are the qualities that prevent us from accomplishing our mission and achieving our full potential. These weaknesses deteriorate influences on the organizational success and growth. Weaknesses are the factors which do not meet the standards we feel they should meet. Weaknesses in an organization may be depreciating machinery, insufficient research and development facilities, narrow product range, poor decision-making, etc. Weaknesses are controllable. They must be minimized and eliminated. For instance - to overcome obsolete machinery, new machinery can be purchased. Other examples of organizational weaknesses are huge debts, high employee turnover, complex decision making process, narrow product range, large wastage of raw materials, etc.
Opportunities - Opportunities are presented by the environment within which our organization operates. These arise when an organization can take benefit of conditions in its environment to plan and execute strategies that enable it to become more profitable. Organizations can gain competitive advantage by making use of opportunities. Organization should be careful and recognize the opportunities and grasp them whenever they arise. Selecting the targets that will best serve the clients while getting desired results is a difficult task. Opportunities may arise from market, competition, industry/government and technology. Increasing demand for telecommunications accompanied by deregulation is a great opportunity for new firms to enter telecom sector and compete with existing firms for revenue.
Threats - Threats arise when conditions in external environment jeopardize the reliability and profitability of the organization’s business. They compound the vulnerability when they relate to the weaknesses. Threats are uncontrollable. When a threat comes, the stability and survival can be at stake. Examples of threats are - unrest among employees; ever changing technology; increasing competition leading to excess capacity, price wars and reducing industry profits; etc.
Advantages of SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis is instrumental in strategy formulation and selection. It is a strong tool, but it involves a great subjective element. It is best when used as a guide, and not as a prescription. Successful businesses build on their strengths, correct their weakness and protect against internal weaknesses and external threats. They also keep a watch on their overall business environment and recognize and exploit new opportunities faster than its competitors.
SWOT Analysis helps in strategic planning in following manner-
It is a source of information for strategic planning.
Builds organization’s strengths.
Reverse its weaknesses.
Maximize its response to opportunities.
Overcome organization’s threats.
It helps in identifying core competencies of the firm.
It helps in setting of objectives for strategic planning.
It helps in knowing past, present and future so that by using past and current data, future plans can be chalked out.
SWOT Analysis provide information that helps in synchronizing the firm’s resources and capabilities with the competitive environment in which the firm operates.
SWOT ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK
Limitations of SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis is not free from its limitations. It may cause organizations to view circumstances as very simple because of which the organizations might overlook certain key strategic contact which may occur. Moreover, categorizing aspects as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats might be very subjective as there is great degree of uncertainty in market. SWOT Analysis does stress upon the significance of these four aspects, but it does not tell how an organization can identify these aspects for itself.
There are certain limitations of SWOT Analysis which are not in control of management. These include-
Price increase;
Inputs/raw materials;
Government legislation;
Economic environment;
Searching a new market for the product which is not having overseas market due to import restrictions; etc.
Hello Everyone. Preparations for the Call-to-Action Seminar June 4-5th are on-going but I have attached the agenda for the event, as it stands at the moment. I have also attached a pdf form for registration if you have been having problems with the on-line registration process.
Informal Learning: Any Way You Want It, Any Time You Need It
Norm Kamikow - 3/28/13
Informal learning has answers to some of the most pressing educational challenges organizations face.
When noted psychologist and Stanford professor Albert Bandura was growing up in a Canadian village about 50 miles from Edmonton, Alberta, his educational options were limited. The youngest of six children born to Polish wheat farmers, he attended a country high school with only 20 students and two teachers. In later years, he talked about how he and the other students had to “take charge of their own education.”
These early academic experiences may have contributed to the eventual development of Bandura’s influential ideas about self-directed learning, observation and imitation. In his 1977 book Social Learning Theory, he wrote: “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”
While the concepts of self-reliance, individual efficacy and modeling that informed much of Bandura’s theory remain, the term “social learning” has undergone a drastic transformation since his treatise. In the last decade, globalization and the rampant availability of highly interactive technologies have altered the modern definition of social learning and its practice.
In their book The New Social Learning, authors Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham define social learning as “people becoming more informed, gaining a wider perspective and being able to make better decisions by engaging with others. It acknowledges that learning happens with and through other people, as a matter of participating in a community, not just by acquiring knowledge.”
Dan Pontefract, head of learning and collaboration at communications company Telus and one of the speakers at our CLO Symposium last fall, goes a bit further. In a recent blog post he described social learning as an “exchange of ideas, knowledge or information typically characterized by friendly interaction through online services that provides supplemental understanding, often via personal and professional networks.”
Social learning has always been a part of the workplace. It occurs every day at meetings, in discussion groups and during lunch. But technology has amplified the informal learning taking place and provided unexpected answers to some of the most pressing educational challenges organizations face today.
Today, people talk, ask questions and engage via Facebook, unconstrained by geography or time zones. They look up ideas and micro-share on Twitter. They create media-rich virtual communities or immersive environments that enable communication collaboration and sharing between knowledgeable people who would never have been able to connect before.
There are many benefits to incorporating social learning into training and development. It expands opportunities to connect expertise and talent, makes informal learning available on a larger scale and offers valuable learning at the moment of need.
But social media technologies need to be an integral part of work, embedded into the organization’s learning cycles and into the business of doing business. The chief learning officer’s job is to figure out how social learning works for his or her organization.
Though decades have passed and technology has evolved, Bandura was on to something. People will learn what they want when they want, either because of or despite our best efforts to design and deliver learning.
The special report on social learning included with this issue provides valuable input and ideas I hope you can use to make social learning a potent tool at your enterprise and create the culture of innovation and collaboration so critical to business today.
2013 GLOBAL STEMx EDUCATION CONFERENCE
