The Eyes Have It

Two quotes from a paper I blogged about a couple of weeks age — Envisioning Learning by Jay Cross of the Internet Time Group:

We’ve confused reading and writing with learning. Most lessons are linear and verbal. Most books do not contain a single illustration. On the web, one highly-regarded but seriously misguided guru maintains a large website on usability (of all things) that contains not one picture. eLearning lessons abound with garish, meaningless clip-art. Schools devote years to teaching students to read and hours on developing their visual intelligence.

In a world that is increasingly concerned with speed, we force learners to read words that they must repeat in their minds in order to decode them and process them associatively. You can grok a picture but not a block of text.

Last week I chanced upon a book on the shelves of the free bookswap at a neighborhood recycling center: Visual Thinking, by Rudolf Arnheim. He thinks our disdain for images comes from believing that perception is different from thinking. We’re aware that our perceptions may be faulty. The world abounds with illusion. Distant objects look small but they are not; a straight stick entering water looks bent. So society is suspicious of perception – and has been since at least the time when Moses came down from the mountain carrying tablets of text and decreed that the sculpture (“graven images) be destroyed. Arnheim makes a strong case that perception and thinking are one. We think visually.