[ExI] Bandwidth of Information Gleaning

[pjmanney]

>I don't think there was necessarily any parade-raining here.<

You were not the object of my tirade.  I knew you would understand by virtue of your own experiences.

>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.<

Do not confuse marketing with multimedia.  No one likes marketing.  I'm visual and they drive me nuts.

For those who deride multimedia, a little history may be in order.  The modern multimedia presentation was conceived by Charles Eames (yes, he of the plywood chairs) and George Nelson (yes, he of the slat bench and groovy clocks) in a presentation they originally designed for the University of Georgia, Athens (where Nelson taught) and subsequently taught in 1953 at UCLA.  Back in the bad old days of audiovisual, it took eight people to make the lecture 'run.'  Now, you'd need one person and a laptop.  Their point was that by "using 'high-speed techniques such as film, sildes, sound, music, narration,' they designed a course... whose stated goals included 'the breaking down of barriers between fields of learning... making people a little more intuitive... increasing communication between people and things.'"  [from EAMES DESIGN, by Neuhart, Neuhart and Eames]

They sounded very extropian for 1953, didn't they?

It was not received well by most of the academics they lectured.  Interestingly, the mid-century academics made many of the same old-fogey points I read on the list today.  Because the world moved on.  The evolution of memetic dispersion won the day.

BTW, the Eameses were brilliant in the development and use of multimedia teaching.  They created the famous Mathematica exhibit, The Powers of Ten movie, etc.  Just those two examples alone (out of dozens) did more to teach the fundamentals of math and science to those who might not have understood the concepts otherwise than anything else I've ever seen. There are scholars now who credit those presentations to inspiring their pursuit of math/science careers.

A psych prof in Ohio writes well on the subject of the Eameses and multimedia, considering them in the cognitive psychological vanguard.  I completely agree...:

http://peripersonalspace.wordpress.com/2006/11/16/in-the-cognitive-psychological-vanguard-charles-and-ray-eames/

http://peripersonalspace.wordpress.com/2006/11/17/charles-and-ray-eames-psychologically-inspired/

>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.<

Excellent strategy, Anne, and you get my point completely.  It's about translation.  Whatever works.

PJ