[ExI] Bandwidth of Information Gleaning

[Anne Corwin]

I don't think there was necessarily any parade-raining here.  What I think is that when someone wants, say, their employees to learn something, they ought to offer multiple means of getting the information.  That's part of acknowledging diversity -- realizing that not everyone learns the same way, and offering your teaching mechanisms accordingly.  Which means that people who learn best via text have every reason to be annoyed when the text is obscured by layers of blinking smiley faces and "Punch the Monkey!" animations -- nobody is suggesting that multimedia go away, but rather, that perhaps it might sometimes be a bit gratuitous.

I had a manager a while back who was very verbally-oriented -- he preferred spontaneous verbal/auditory interaction, whereas I am more text-oriented and visual.  We had some difficulties communicating -- I had a hard time listening to him, and he had a hard time dealing with the e-mails I sent.  But then I got the idea of writing down my thoughts before talking to him -- basically I wrote what I would have written in the e-mail, printed it, and then went to his office and read it to him.  That worked out quite well.  And that's the kind of model I see as being a useful one for thinking about communication in the future -- one that makes heavy use of translation and accomodation of processing differences.

- Anne


"Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"
- Meg Murry, "A Wrinkle In Time"
       
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