“E-learning experts argue that withholding computers at a young age could actually deprive children of modern communications skills. ‘One area of literacy that’s changing is the order in which things are presented – it isn’t linear, it’s organised spatially, and often some meaning is carried in the design, layout, images, sounds, movement, subtle changes in colour in a game – it’s all part of what literacy is in today’s world,’ says Flewitt. ‘These are fundamental changes to operational literacy, the biggest since the printing press.‘ ”

Naturally some question is left as to whether this effect is limited to young children as a group or if one can detect a tendency toward acoustic involvement among younger participants in college classrooms and corporate training centers. The main point, however, is that linearity might already be optional in the classroom, where new and different styles of presentation and involvement might be called for in order to better reach the audience.

To contrast Dr Flewitt’s comment on linear versus spatial literacy, consider this synopsis of McLuhan’s acoustic space by Library and Archives Canada:

“The key characteristic of acoustic space is that it engages multiple senses at the same time. It does not demand that objects be dissected to be understood; rather, the multiple parts co-exist simultaneously. To understand acoustic space, you must perceive all of it, not focus on one part. In other words, acoustic space demands that you apprehend figure and ground simultaneously, that the senses work together. McLuhan believed that oral cultures existed in acoustic space since their primary mode of communicating was speech.”

In this interview with Nina Sutton, Mcluhan explains the rise and dominance of visual space from the phonetic alphabet forward: McLuhan on Acoustic Space.

As a sidebar it is interesting to note that McLuhan eventually dropped the use of the term Global Village from his work preferring the term Global Theatre instead. Apparently Global Village goes back to the advent of radio while the notion of the Global Theatre is more a part of Sputnik, television and modern global communications.

References.

AllThingsD: Early Adopters

PCPro: How Much Tech Can Children Take?

Library and Archives Canada: Old Messengers, New Media: The Legacy of Innis and McLuhan

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine (©1969, 1994) by Playboy. Download here in PDF: (mcluhan-playboy).

Silentium - Latin for "Shut Up & Pay Attention"

A recent study from researchers Louis Deslauriers, Ellen Schelew and Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman suggests that the Methuselah of instructional technologies, the venerable broadcast lecture, might finally be showing signs of going the way of geocentricity and the four humors. Applying methods taken from the theory of “deliberate practice” by psychologist Anders Ericsson, the research team introduced a more interactive, discussion-based and assessment-oriented approach to a physics class that strongly implies major improvements to science and engineering instruction in general.

The setting for the study involves two groups of electromagnetics students (control: 267; test: 271) wherein both were given the same learning objectives and enjoyed the same pedagogical approach (but not the same instructors) for the first 11 weeks of instruction. On week 12, Deslauriers and Schelew (both of whom have limited teaching experience) jumped into the fray and according to the BPS Research Digest lead the test group utilizing “…discussions in small groups, group tasks, quizzes on pre-class reading, clicker questions (each student answers questions using an electronic device that feeds their answers back to the teacher), and instructor feedback.” And, what is especially important to note here: there was no formal lecturing. According to the researchers the object of the game was:

“…to have the students spend all their time in class engaged in deliberate practice at ‘thinking scientifically’ in the form of making and testing predictions and arguments about the relevant topics, solving problems, and critiquing their own reasoning and that of others.”

In contrast to the test group, the control group went on learning the same material in the normal (typically passive) fashion epitomized by classroom lectures for probably the last 900 years. The students, however, apparently noticed a difference. As quoted in the BPS review:

“Student engagement (measured by trained observers) and attendance in the control group was unchanged in week 12 compared with earlier weeks. In the intervention group, attendance rose by 20 per cent and engagement nearly doubled.“

The critic or cynic might assert that the presenters were putting on a better show in the test case. What about student performance? On the first day of class after week 12 both groups were tested on what they had learned the previous week. In addition, as part of the preparation for the test, both groups were given all the materials used by the intervention group, i.e., the clicker questions, group activities and problem sets, and exercise solutions. The results are as striking as the jump in student engagement:

The non-lecture intervention group averaged 74 percent correct while the control group averaged 41 percent. Factoring out random guessing, the intervention group did twice as well as the traditional lecture students (the effect size being on the order of 2.5 standard deviations!). Not to be downplayed, student reviews rated the non-lecture approach very positively. Ninety percent said they enjoyed the process.

Jeffrey Mervis writing for the AAAS ScienceNow magazine quotes Wieman as saying:

“ ‘It’s almost certainly the case that lectures have been ineffective for centuries. But now we’ve figured out a better way to teach’ that makes students an active participant in the process, Wieman says. Cognitive scientists have found that ‘learning only happens when you have this intense engagement,’ he adds. ‘It seems to be a property of the human brain.’ ” – Jeffrey Mervis, A Better Way to Teach?

Given the novelty of the technique and the overt nature of the study there has been some criticism of the results based on the Hawthorne Effect. The research team discounts this criticism on the basis that the intervention only occupied a small percentage of the students’ overall daily learning activities. Drilling a little deeper, psychology professor Daniel Willingham (as recounted in Carey below) cautioned that the study might not have been designed well enough to discern which of the factors introduced in the new classroom style account for the gains in student performance and to what degree.

In what might be one of the clearest victories for proponents of the Inverted Classroom the research team is optimistic of the result and reckons it can be generalized to a wide range of post-secondary courses. No doubt further studies can be expected. The study in question is supported by a $12 million dollar program to investigate new methods to enhance science instruction using research-backed methods.

References.

Deslauriers, L., Schelew, E., and Wieman, C. (2011). Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class. Science, 332 (6031), 862-864 DOI: 10.1126/science.1201783

Carey, Benedict (2011). Less Talk, More Action: Improving Science Learning
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/science/13teach.html

Mervis, Jeffrey (2011). A Better Way to Teach?
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/a-better-way-to-teach.html

Dwyer, Liz (2011). Research Proves College Lectures Need to Go the Way of the Dinosaur
http://www.good.is/post/research-proves-college-lectures-need-to-go-the-way-of-the-dinosaur/

Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

The Inverted Classroom
http://www.hg2s.com/blog/2009/11/14/the-inverted-classroom/

Is the Internet Changing the Way We Learn?

I like the infographic (see below) “How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education.” It presents an interesting timeline of developments in educational delivery and provides a handy reminder of some things that I’ve forgotten with regard to trends and current industry buzz. And yes, education in all its forms is an industry and has its buzz.

First, looking at the history of distance learning and non-traditional (i.e., non-lecture/classroom) modes of content delivery, writers rarely admit anything that comes before television. Frankly, I never see radio mentioned. Maybe that’s because to most, television is the first “modern” technology. But, that said, there is a long tradition (Boston, 1728) of correspondence education that rises through the Victorian Era (University of London, 1858) that seems important in laying the groundwork of several notable non-residential K-12 programs and even, I suspect, to the acceptance of modern online universities. Perhaps not surprisingly, the British Open University is the first school on the graphic to enter the fray in the early 1970s using television as its primary mode of disseminating lectures to the masses. Funny how television never really materialized as a great training tool. In retrospect, is that surprising?

This is the first of my jogged memories from the chart:

The UO (as it is known) makes perfect sense to me but when it was tried in the US it failed miserably (not so in the UK). You can read about it here. For those of you wondering, the flip side is also true in my case: Schools like the University of Phoenix (as they currently exist) do not make perfect sense to me and yet they are thriving in the US (scroll down the chart a bit), educational bubble notwithstanding. So much for my role as an industry pundit. In ancient times I would have been stoned to death.

Overall this graphic fosters a meme that I consider somewhat dubious: the Internet is changing the way we learn. I think you have to be careful with this one. First and foremost it is probably not the case that we are learning any differently than our forefathers. It is probably the case that we utilize new and different methods for obtaining information, gathering the rudiments of new skills and assessing our mastery of a subject or topic. But beyond that the need for engagement, practice, recall and synthesis seem to be standard among members of our species. As an example of some old wine in a new bottle masquerading as a new instructional form witness the Khan Academy. Is the actual process of learning  – that is, the embedding of new knowledge or skills – any different here? Does it have to be to be important? This brings me to the second reminder:

Given the explosion in alternate forms of content delivery, I don’t know anyone who would go to a traditional college or classroom as a first choice.

Isn’t that odd? I have to confess, if I had to bone up on linear algebra or differential equations, say, I’d go to the Khan Academy (note mathematics as the example) or the Open Courseware Consortium, not to the local college. What’s that tell you about: a) my prior experience at university, b) the reputation of quality of American higher/continued education, c) the role of technology in my lifestyle, d) my lifestyle, e) the cost and accessibility of higher/continued education in America, f) the fact that too many of us have (had to) become consumer-oriented with regard to our learning (in contrast to our “certification”). Take your pick.

Interestingly, given the apparent rise of e-learning since 1999, you would think that we have a viable alternative to instructor-lead training in online web-based tutorials. On the whole nothing could be farther from the truth. Sadly, even though traditional classroom instruction might be foundering as designers search for compelling new forms to save live presentations, it’s hard to find evidence that e-learning as a genre ever succeeded in a big way. Taken as a whole completion rates for online courses are and have been deplorable, levels of engagement minimal (possibly explaining the previous point), and even when they are completed online courses don’t often meet educational objectives except in the most superficial ways when compared to control groups. E-learning does have some notable traits that distinguish it in the pantheon of educational delivery methods: it is a cost-effective way to broadcast information to a population that might have geographical and temporal constraints; and, it does drive consumers to virtual and brick-and-mortar classrooms when provided as an option.

Frankly, if I were saddled with the task of saving e-learning, I would go to YouTube.

Maybe what that says is that even though Television failed as an educational panacea in the early days of distance learning, Son of Television is back, bigger and better than ever before. But does any of this change what I have to do to learn linear algebra? Enough said.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

Infocus 'What Not To Present' Contest

It’s not clear whether the presentation experts at InFocus Labs have opened a Pandora’s Box with this event, but their “What Not To Present“ contest apparently overwhelmed even their most staid judges in terms of popular response and the degree to which things can sink and still be considered acceptable. The response from the field was both daunting and gratifying:

“Our ‘What Not to Present’ contest was epic! Many thanks to all of you kind folks that submitted entries and spread the word about it. Many amazingly horrendous slides were sent in from all around the world. We laughed. We cried. We cringed.”

Naturally once the floodgates were opened the selection of a winner was not at all an easy task.

“We randomly chose our top 3 winners, but then quickly realized that we had to do more. So we are giving away ANOTHER projector to the slide we thought was the most horrendous. We passed the ugliness around the InFocus offices and to many of our partners pandering for votes – and we have a winner!”

Prizes generously include InFocus projectors and accessories.

Suspense mounting? Here’s the First Place winner from the random selection round:

See yourself in that slide? Me too. Kind of makes me cringe. Hopefully we all have slides like that locked securely in our pasts.

But that’s not the point of the “What Not to Present” competition. The good folks at InFocus must surely be sick and tired of their excellent products being associated with – one might even say equated to – the kind of visual flotsam that populated this contest. And they’d like it to stop. So, in an ongoing effort to assist in cultivating our design and presentation senses they are going to offer ongoing therapy to the readers of their blog wherein experts Garr Reynolds and Ellen Finkelstein will offer free advice on how to make presentations attract our attentions for all the right reasons. So, stay tuned. In the meantime, and capturing a feeling right at home on these pages, Ellen Finkelstein offers a few tips on how to avoid being submitted as a contestant in next year’s “What Not to Present” contest: Have Compassion on Your Audience!

Now, ready for this year’s Grand Prize Winner of the worldwide InFocus “What Not to Present” competition? Here you go.

Further Reading

PowerPoint Overload – Two Pounds of Sausage in a One Pound Bag

“The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within”

“PowerPoint Does Rocket Science–and Better Techniques for Technical Reports”

“We know from existing research on human interaction that we like people who are like us. We wanted to see whether that held true for these training agents.” – Dr. Lori Foster Thompson

Measurements of enjoyment, engagement and effectiveness of the training suggest that each element has a different cause. Subjects reported being more engaged in the program when the avatar matched their race and gender. Learning, on the other hand, was enhanced when the online helper employed feedback and teaching styles more akin to that of the student. Whether this predisposition is strong enough to constitute an outright learning style remains to be seen. According the researcher Thompson:

“We found that people liked the helper more, were more engaged and viewed the program more favorably when they perceived the helper agent as having a feedback style similar to their own – regardless of whether that was actually true.”

Interestingly researchers found no link between enjoyment or overall success of educational outcome based on gender or race. Matching teaching style did, however, have a pronounced effect on performance on quizzes. What might come as the greatest surprise concerns the dominant factor affecting participants’ ratings of overall effectiveness and enjoyment. As it turns out the “perceived” similarity of the avatar is more important than the reality underlying its design.

“We found that people liked the helper more, were more engaged and viewed the program more favorably when they perceived the helper agent as having a feedback style similar to their own – regardless of whether that was actually true.” – Lori F. Thompson

What the study suggests is that perception might be more important than reality where avatar design and success of online training are concerned. In essence, if a learner believes that a particular online helper has been designed “specifically for people like you,” its effects will likely be beneficial to the outcome of the training. Regrettably from the point of view of the instructional designer and developer of the training, one-size-fits-all might be out the window:

“It is important that the people who design online training programs understand that one size does not fit all. Efforts to program helper agents that may be tailored to individuals can yield very positive results for the people taking the training.” – Lori F. Thompson

References.

Tara S. Behrend, Lori Foster Thompson, Similarity effects in online training: Effects with computerized trainer agents, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 27, Issue 3, Group Awareness in CSCL Environments, May 2011, Pages 1201-1206, ISSN 0747-5632, DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2010.12.016. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDC-5230FHR-1/2/0510a5a803281cf536a0b381dcd2052d)

Participation in Pedagogical Agent Design: Effects on Training Outcomes, Tara S. Behrend, A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Psychology, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2009.

Many classroom instructors and and instructional designers assume that clearer, easier to read, media reduce the “friction” of learning and act to promote and accelerate the transmission of new ideas and skills. Not so, say Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenhiemer and Erikka Vaughan who penned the study soon to be published in the journal Cognition. In some cases, they assert, making material harder to learn actually improves long-term memory. What’s worse, they have the control group data to prove it.

“Many educators believe that their ability to teach effectively relies on instinct and experience. However, research has shown that instinct can be deceiving and lead to educational strategies that are detrimental to learners.” – Diemand-Yauman, et al.

Two studies were undertaken to test the hypothesis that “desirable difficulties” can lead to enhanced learning. In the first, twenty-eight participants ranging in age from 18 to 40 were asked to learn fictional taxonomic data similar to that found in biology classes. The disfluent media presented the material in 12-point Comic Sans rendered in 60% grayscale or 12-point Bodoni MT also in 60% grayscale. The fluent media used 16-point Arial rendered in plain black. (It should be noted that the author knows more than one professional designer who considers Arial to be at least as disfluent as Comic Sans, grayscale notwithstanding.)

Participants were given 90 seconds to memorize their fictional taxonomic data. For example:

The norgletti

• Two feet tall
• Eats flower petals and pollen
• Has brown eyes

Each data set like the above was composed of three species of aliens, each with seven features, for a total of 21 items to be learned. After 90 seconds of study the participants were distracted for 15 minutes with another task after which their recall was tested (“What is the diet of the norgletti?”).

The results? Fluent learners successfully recalled 72.8% of their data. Disfluent learners scored higher: 86.5%! What’s more, differences between the two disfluent fonts were not found (probably because ugly is ugly).

“Similarly, many education researchers and practitioners believe that reducing extraneous cognitive load is always beneficial for the learner. In other words, if a student has a relatively easy time learning a new lesson or concept, both the student and instructor are likely to label the session as successful even if the student is unable to retrieve the information at a later time.” – Diemand-Yauman, et al.

Not wishing to hastily generalize their preliminary results to classroom conditions, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenhiemer and Vaughan arranged a study with 222 Ohio high school students (ages 15-18). In the high school study teacher-prepared instructional content (Powerpoint and worksheets) were reformatted (but not edited) using disfluent fonts or left unchanged. Different sections of the classes were randomly assigned to a disfluent or control group. Teachers were told that the study focused on the effects of different fonts in presentations to counteract the Pygmalion Effect. After the classes were presented in normal fashion exams were given along with a survey to assess whether disfluency affects motivation.

The results? Once again the disfluent group scored higher (m=0.164, sd=1.03; m=-0.295, sd=1.03; using Z-scores) and there was no difference between ugly fonts. Further, the survey revealed no motivational differences between fluent and disfluent presentations.

The authors warn that interpretation of the results and their subsequent application in the classroom be cautiously undertaken. First, the novelty and distinctiveness of the disfluent fonts might be a factor enhancing their “desirable difficulty.” Another issue is that the point at which a typeface changes from “desirably difficult” to “illegible” is not known.

The authors concede that there is a point at which “disfluent” pushed to its extreme becomes “impossible,” hindering learning altogether.

At present it seems as though the tonic effects of disfluency probably follow a U-shaped curve and that the exact parameters that affect the shape have to be teased out through further experiment.

Another question is whether this disfluent effect will be seen with other media as well. The authors of this study only considered typographic media, but one has to wonder if it is possible to obtain similar results with audio and video.

References.

Diemand-Yauman, C., et al. Fortune favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition (2010), doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012

McDaniel, M. A., Hines, R., & Guynn, M. (2000). When text difficulty benefits less-skilled readers. Journal of Memory and Language, 46(3), 544–561.

McNamara, D. S., Kintsch, E., Butler-Songer, N., & Kintsch, W. (1996). Are good texts always better? Text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14, 1–43.

Oppenheimer, D. M. (2008). The secret life of fluency. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(6), 237–241.

Sweller, J., & Chandler, P. (1994). Why some material is difficult to learn. Cognition and Instruction, 12(3), 185–233.

I don’t think this is much taught in Instructional Design courses, but the design of a presentation conveys information in and of itself to the audience. This is due in large part to the fact that all the elements of a course or presentation (including the presenter) constitute a Gestalt that is projected to the audience.

Good design matters because good design leads to clarity. And clarity facilitates perception.

The design elements often constitute the ground in the figure-ground relationship of the medium, but the whole package conveys a message. The medium is the message.

As an example of how design sends nonverbal cues to the viewer, take a look at the short talk by John McWade of Before & After Magazine. Although taken completely from the design world the example captures the effects of font, color and shape passed as a subliminal message to the unsuspecting eye.

It is not hard to cite these effects in educational media and presentations. How often does a slide, presentation or workshop exercise say “boring” or “we don’t care” or “this is not important” or “this is hard to understand” to an audience? Media evoke reactions from the viewer and the reactions are often affective in nature. Connie Malamed at the eLearning Coach puts it this way:

“This has strong implications for learning, because of the impact positive or negative feelings have on motivation, comprehension and retention.”

We design educational media for a reason. Well designed media lower the barriers to comprehension and assist the mastery of new skills. Things that detract from these goals include boring and inept graphics, awkward symmetry and poor layouts, illegible typefaces, abrasive or boring color schemes, and too much information.

For more information on good design see:

Before & After Magazine

“How Visual Clarity Affects Learning,” The eLearning Coach

Visual Language for Designers

The Bandwagon

If you are thinking of using social media in a class to help build useful collaborative connections, retire the fears of shy students and introduce the same engagement you see in sites like Facebook, think again.  A recent study by the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology suggests that the use of social media in classrooms might yield little effect in improved communications and enhanced connections between students. The study into the effects of social media was conducted as part of a course on the use of social media and tools. It included contributions from online learning and course management systems and discussion groups that were proposed to enhance instruction, improve communication and facilitate connections between the students and course content. The results indicate that poor social acumen in the face-to-face interactions might be mirrored in the (more) virtual social medium. What’s more, echoing teacher and educational social media researcher Michael Wesch, the RIT study suggests that the educational use of social media may have to be learned:

“…the educational use of social media may not counteract poor social connections that are seen in face-to-face communication or elicit the same impacts seen in the use of social media sites such as MySpace and FaceBook.”

Researcher and team leader Susan Barnes comments on the hopes and goals of social media in the educational environment relative to her team’s findings:

“Many social media advocates have argued that the use of these tools in classroom settings could greatly enhance interaction and learning and assist shyer, more reserved students in becoming more involved, as has been seen in other online environments. However, our findings show that the incorporation of social media had no measurable impact on social connections, to the point that students did not consider other members of the class to be part of their social network.”

The RIT research team plans to expand the study to consider different educational formats and additional social media applications in an effort to determine the effects and differences of social media from traditional classrooms. The intent is to help educational planners and instructional designers better use social media in course development and delivery.

“The issues surrounding poor social network construction within online educational environments points to greater opportunities to examine how technology and mediated software can be better designed to suit the types of communication and interactions desired by our students.”  – Christopher Egert, co-author

References.
Jacobs, Stephen, Egert, Christopher A., Barnes, Susan B., “Social Media Theory and Practice: Lessons Learned for a Pioneering Course,” 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, T4J-1, October 18 – 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX.

Study Examines Use of Social Media in the Classroom

“These findings cast doubt on a long-standing belief in education…. The belief in using concrete examples is very deeply ingrained, and hasn’t been questioned or tested.” – Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author

Ohio State’s Research Communications quotes Kaminski as saying:

“Teachers often use real-world examples in math class, the researchers said.  In some classrooms, for example, teachers may explain probability by pulling a marble out of a bag of red and blue marbles and determining how likely it will be one color or the other.

But students may learn better if teachers explain the concept as the probability of choosing one of n things from a larger set of m things.”

This research might help explain why so many people find word problems (and the semantic or linguistic use of mathematics) so daunting in mathematics and physics. In Kaminski’s words:

“The issue can also be seen in the story problems that math students are often given. For example, there is the classic problem of two trains that leave different cities heading toward each other at different speeds.  Students are asked to figure out when the two trains will meet.

The danger with teaching using this example is that many students only learn how to solve the problem with the trains.

If students are later given a problem using the same mathematical principles, but about rising water levels instead of trains, that knowledge just doesn’t seem to transfer.”

Sloutsky sees a role for word problems, however, just not as an instructional aid:

“It is very difficult to extract mathematical principles from story problems. Story problems could be an incredible instrument for testing what was learned.  But they are bad instruments for teaching.”

Kaminski’s and Sloutsky’s study should provide useful insight for those looking at ways to better teach subjects like mathematics, physics, signal analysis, algorithm design, dynamics, logic or economics. It should be noted that Kaminski and Sloutsky worked with Andrew Heckler of Ohio State’s Physics Department on parts of the study.

References.
Concrete Examples Don’t Help Students Learn Math, Study Finds
Students Learn Better When the Numbers Don’t Talk and Dance
Kaminski et al., LEARNING THEORY: The Advantage of Abstract Examples in Learning Math, Science 25 April 2008: 454-455, DOI: 10.1126/science.1154659.

Issues of memory, interest and higher cognitive processing aside, preliminary research at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University suggests that the retina transmits data to the brain at 10 million bits per second – the rate of a basic 10Base-T Ethernet connection. Tufte sets the stage for the discussion by noting that viewing a PowerPoint slide is vastly different from viewing the world:

“Looking around the world is easier than analyzing evidence displays, and there may also be within-brain impediments to handling vast amounts of abstract data, but at least the narrow-band choke point for information resolution should not be the display itself.

The average PP slide contains 40 words, which take less 10 seconds to read. Call that 1000 bits per second, which comes to 1/10,000 of the routine human retina-brain data capacity.

Also most of our evidence displays are in flatland, which is a easier than 3D perceptual tasks. On the other hand, many serious data displays are not in the familiar 4D space/time coordinate system that our eye-brain knows so well.

Memory problems can be partly handled by high-resolution displays, so that key comparisons are made adjacent in space within the common eyespan. Spatial adjacency greatly reduces the memory problems associated with making comparisons of small amounts of information stacked in time (PP slides, for example).

– Edward Tufte, July 26, 2006″

The process from world to retina to brain seems sufficiently complex and multivariate that I am inclined to side with Tufte’s correspondent Niels Olson when he points out:

“While PowerPoint is surely a horrid way to transmit information, I’m not sure we can inject very abstract information into people at ethernet rates. 40 words in 10 seconds doesn’t translate to 1000 bits per second transmitted over the optic nerve, which connects the retina to the banks of the calcarine sulcus in the occipital lobe, via the optic chiasm and the lateral geniculate nucleus. At a minimum the data being transmitted would require an analysis of the typography’s geometry (edge detection being a basic function of the retina), the amount of the visual field taken up by the display, the location of the display’s image on the retina relative to the fovea, and the rates of change in the display and surrounding motion (the speaker, other audience members, etc).”

Interestingly Olsen picks up on a decidedly (Eric) McLuhanesque point when he comments on the 240-words-per-minute rate, a figure that roughly corresponds to both the average reading speed of sighted readers today (McLuhan) and the rate at which words in audio form (like podcasts) are transferred [Olsen comments on this in more detail in a later post]:

“Your guesstimate of 40 words in 10 seconds leads to a 240 word-per-minute reading speed. Like normal readers, braille readers can read at 200 to 400 words per minute. Is there any evidence that a person with an aquired partial nerve blindness also aquires an impaired ability to reason spatially? My classmates at Tulane Med found they preferred listening to the lecture audio I recorded at one-and-a-half speed, which also pushes close to 200 words per minute. Most people found twice-speed to be uncomfortably fast. This 200, 240, 400 word-per-minute rate may be a more accurate definition of the rate at which the human mind can receive and abstract information in word form, and this is likely driven by communication between Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area via the arcuate tract. Keep in mind, reading is a highly abstract function.”

The discussion has far from petered out. Combining the eye and the ear, The New York Times reported on research conducted at the University of California, San Diego, which calculated the average daily intake of data for a North American at 34 Gigabytes plus 100,000 words. What this means is that if you believe the estimate, our eyes and ears are busy handling that much data via all channels in a 24-hour period. According to the New York Times and the San Diego study the eye is still hard at work in the new media:

“Print media has declined consistently, but if you add up the amount of time people spend surfing the Web, they are actually reading more than ever.”

I leave it as an assignment to the interested reader to calculate the rate of information in Mbits/second of 34 Gigabytes per 24-hour period.

HMI Report/UC San Diego

References.

Penn researchers calculate how much the eye tells the brain

Kristin Koch, Judith McLean, Ronen Segev, Michael A. Freed, Michael J. Berry, Vijay Balasubramanian, Peter Sterling, “How Much the Eye Tells the Brain,” Current Biology 16 (July 25, 2006), 1428-1434.

The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day

How Much Information?