Wednesday
Sep082010

The Language of Categories and Thinking


This week’s edition of the New Scientist has an interesting article on how we talk to ourselves (Your Inner Voice).


Several pieces of research point out just how crucial the language of categories is to our thinking. While labeling individual items is a factor in the development of our intelligence, that of categories is stronger still.


Infants, for example, are more effective at grouping objects if they already have the names for the categories. It’s as if having the category names greatly aids the thinking involved in sorting the actual objects. And in another study, youngsters were better at spatial reasoning if armed with prepositions.

Equally, adults who have lost their language skills through having a stroke are no longer as able to categorise objects.

Furthermore, memory is also affected by the acquisition of category words as memory itself is, by nature, categorical. We tend not to remember specific details.

So what does this mean for schools? For a start review the foolish devaluing of categorizing as mere information processing: a so–called lower order thinking skill. And realise that it’s a life–long task to master the skill.

After all, just because a toddler is able to sort toy animals from toy vehicles doesn’t mean they no longer need to be explicitly taught to categorise.

And what better way to learn to categorise with increasingly complex subject matter than with model maps? The visual and spatial structures are perfect for discussion and deep reasoning.


 

Wednesday
Sep082010

Efficient Running

Just because I’ve been running now for 45 years, I can’t help squeezing the subject into whatever I’m doing. So it’s running and infographics.

The Guardian newspaper runs a fabulous How and Why column every Friday in their sports section. It covers all sports and focuses on explaining an intricate aspect of the sport.

In the same manner, I’ve captured what I’ve read and discovered about efficient running. As you can see, it’s not a complicated visual, merely an annotated line drawing. Sometimes it’s all you need if you’re able to isolate and identify the specific parts of the body you’re writing about.

If you’re interested in trying out my advice, the best way to start taking notice of how you run is to focus on the ankles. Ensure they are very relaxed at all times and particularly so on landing. Allow an immediate forward moving momentum with not even the slightest sensation of breaking. Absolutely no thudding at all. Just quiet flowing, tap-tap sounding light running.

Monday
Sep062010

How do we choose?

When out on your weekly shop at the supermarket and you come to jam on your list, how many types would you like to choose from? As many as possible?


Professor Sheena Iyengar, the S. T. Lee Professor of Business Columbia University, wanted to find out. Well not about you personally, you understand, but about us generally. And she has. It’s part of her new book, The Art of Choosing.


Her research showed that more than 6 types confuse us and we end up not buying any at all.
I heard her talk last week on Radio 4 explaining our inability to exploit the choices that both government and retailers think we want. Her reasons were interesting and have significance to educators.


Our first difficulty with too much choice is that we simply can’t compare the varieties sufficiently well in order to identify the important characteristics. Or to put it another way, their value to us.
And as a result of that failure, of course, we can’t prioritise.


So in order to be an effective consumer, we need to be able to compare and prioritise. These skills should therefore feature in schools’ citizenship lessons.


So, which Graphic Organisers help us compare? For more than two items, we’re better off with a Table. The items are on one axis and the features on the other. Simple.


But for two items, you can’t beat a Double Bubble. This Graphic Organiser is essentially the same as a Venn diagram but better suited to teaching students the whole process of comparing. This starts with two separate Single Bubbles that capture the characteristics of the two items to be compared.
Having established that, the two Single Bubbles are brought together into a Double Bubble. Only now do we make the comparison. The middle, joined bubbles are the shared, common features while the outer bubbles are the discrete characteristics that differentiate the two items.


If, however, you know the two features that are most important to you when choosing a jam, say, price and taste, then a Crossed Continua might be a better bet. The end result will also provide you with a priority list based on positions in the favoured quadrant.


If you don’t use the Crossed Continua, which gives you ranking, then the Diamond Ranking method works well. Simply arrange the items compared into a diamond shape, moving them around to check on your thinking until you arrive at a satisfactory order.



You must be thinking this just a tad too elaborate a process for choosing jam. Yes, of course. But for other more significant choices, the conversation generated by such a visual, kinesthetic and shared process increases reasoning and decreases reactive impulses. Just the thing for developing our citizens of tomorrow.


In another article I’ll show how Graphic Organisers can bring about more informed political choices.

Reference:
Iyengar, S.,(2010,) The Art of Choosing, Hachette
See Professor Iyengar talking at the TEDxEast conference at http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/

Monday
Aug302010

What do categories reveal about the mind?

Quite a lot thinks George Lakoff, author of Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind.


That very title, for example, is a grouping of items in an Australian aboriginal language that has coherence and meaning only in that culture.  To us, of course, such a collection is pretty meaningless. But to this particular aboriginal tribe the category is a reality.


More than that Lakoff argues, categories create our reality.

So when did humans first learn to categorize? Aristotle is reckoned to be the first categorizer but Alex Wright in his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages argues that primitive taxonomies of the natural world pre–dated Aristotle by thousands of years. And determined his intellectual innovation.
But how did humans get to a position to be able to do this early classification? Just how did they learn to develop this skill?


It’s here that it gets very interesting. Pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim thought that tribal societies had a deep unconscious need to project their family and kinship structures onto the world. Genealogy, you see, provides the perfect tool for classification.


Durkheim found, also in Australia, that aboriginal tribes categorized their natural world with a mirror system of their own tribal organization. They simply overlaid the family tree structure.

Over time this framework became the mental tool humans used to organise information about the word in order to make sense of it. Categorising was, and is, our foremost meaning–making tool.
Interesting, you might think, but what has this to do with Graphic Organisers and visual thinking?

In a future article I’ll outline what Model Learning has found in schools regarding the lack of insight teachers have of this central role of categorisation in children’s understanding. And how this accounts for the very limited impact of mind mapping in raising achievement in literacy and thinking skills.  Oh, and what to do about it.

References:
Durkheim, E. & Mauss, (1963) Primitive Classification, University of Chicago Press
Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press
Wright, A. (2007),  Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, Joseph Henry Press

Monday
Aug232010

Dialogue

Peter Stoyko is a friend of mine whom I met in Berlin at the European VizThink conference. He has a series of very interesting and cultured blogs that I highly recommend at stoyko.net

He too is a huge fan of infographics. Below is just part of an infographic that captures several very interesting points about the dynamics of dialogue. If you go to the following page, you can download a full A3 poster. Print it out and put it on your staffroom wall. Study it before a meeting and see if you notice more of what’s going on. Get it at stoyko.net