Left vs Right (World) | David McCandless & Stefanie Posavec | Information Is Beautiful
This is an amazing visual way to convey information. It is what I would like to do more of when writing training. Today, I just had this conversation with a co-worker. She was telling me about how when she would take a test, she would visualize the book and the page number. By seeing the book in her mind, she was able to recall the information.
I am a visual learner as well. For my final exam in grad school, we were each handed a floppy disk (yes, a floppy disk) and a question. We were give six hours to answer the question. Our task was to answer by drawing upon all we had learned over the past two and a half years; this required remembering all that we could about every major learning theorist and their theories.
No small task. How does one prepare?
Well, I will tell you, my friend Kari and I made a mind map. We took butcher paper and filled a wall. Took out our markers and went to work. We had guidelines - no more than three pieces of information for each theorist. For instance, we would draw a bubble and inside write "John Dewey" then draw lines to three bits of information "Pragmatist," "Utilitarian," "Democracy through education." By remembering three points, we knew it would help us remember more. We used color; we drew connections between ideas; we drew stick figures and other crude pictures to represent ideas.
When I went in to take the test, I wasn't sure what to expect. Would our method of study work?
After the first moment of panic at seeing the question - one that I cannot recall - I realized I was going to be able to build an argument. I clearly saw the map in my mind -- Bloom in blue and Friere in red. Piaget in the left hand corner, Milton on the right. Locke in the middle. I saw it all and I was able to recall their theories and build my argument.
My only regret is not rolling up the butcher paper and keeping the map. I earned an A on the exam - and I thank Kari and the mind map for that.
I encourage anyone to try mindmapping. Here is a great online tool for mindmapping and brainstorming: webspiration
Also, for more information about visual information see http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index
1 comment:
Thanks for the post! Webspiration appears to be a very useful tool...
A short while ago when I studied knowledge engineering for my own graduate studies, one of my first projects was the prototyping of a java-based knowledge automation system for a pilot demonstration in a Fortune 50 corporate environment.
A bulk of my ES documentation incorporated visualization of the modeling logic - e.g., optimized decision trees & tables - but I felt that Visio wasn't the best tool suited for that task. It looks as if this tool could have streamlined that documentation process quite a bit, so I will definitely keep this in mind for future reference.
Any recommendations for decision tree analysis tools? I think that the newer versions of Visio are more capable of handling that type of work...
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