Visual Teaching Alliance

December 2009 Blog Posts (13)

The Origin of Visual Expression, Vision and Painting

"The hunt is over but the adrenaline is running high. It's the most challenging and successful kill they can remember. The size of the bison far outnumbered all that came before. And our ancestors wanted to let everyone know about it. But how would they communicate their story and where did they first get the idea to? Where would they find the means to do so? Were the first writings a desperate well thought out attempt to communicate or did they evolve by chance?"

The… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 30, 2009 at 10:20am — No Comments

Can Video Games Teach Kids?

On a fall morning at a public school in New York City, sixth-graders are called to sit down at their desks. At first glance, it looks like any other middle-school science classroom. There’s an aquarium full of tiny turtles and a harried teacher fumbling with a projector.

But then the instructor boots up the day’s lesson: a video game. The students watch as the tiny dolls in PlayStation 3’s LittleBigPlanet (pictured) hop through a maze of contraptions onscreen. The game is being used… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 28, 2009 at 2:32pm — No Comments

Visual Impact, Visual Teaching: A Visual Thesaurus Interview With Timothy Gangwer

Visual Impact, Visual Teaching

December 21, 2009: A Visual Thesaurus Interview WIth Timothy Gangwer

We caught up with Timothy Gangwer, a pioneer in the field of visual learning and the author of "Visual Impact, Visual Teaching", and asked him some hard questions about how teachers can expand their teaching methods to keep pace with the current generation of visual learners.

VT: Timothy, do you think… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 24, 2009 at 1:11am — 1 Comment

A Prefrontal ‘Mind’s Eye’

As you are driving, a car lurks in your blind spot. Where in your brain do you “keep it in mind?” Researchers now suggest that one key region is the so-called frontal eye field (FEF), part of the prefrontal cortex. Long associated with the guidance of eye movements, the FEF now appears not to be an “eye” field at all. Researchers have found evidence that the FEF contains a map of space around the body, in which we can keep any object—visual or auditory, real or imagined—“in mind,” even if we… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 23, 2009 at 10:49am — No Comments

Brain May Use Its 'Mind's Eye' to Control Chaos

When you're searching for a friend in a crowd, it appears that your "mind's eye" acts like a spotlight to scan the scene in front of you until you find the right person.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology monitored the brain activity of monkeys as they searched for a specific tilted, colored bar among a field of bars on a computer screen. The results showed that the monkeys spontaneously shifted their attention in a sequence, like a spotlight that moved from… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 23, 2009 at 10:42am — No Comments

In the Mind's Eye: How the Brain Makes a Whole Out of Parts

When a human looks at a number, letter or other shape, neurons in various areas of the brain's visual center respond to different components of that shape, almost instantaneously fitting them together like a puzzle to create an image that the individual then "sees" and understands, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University report.

A team from the university's Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute describes the complex but speedy process in detail in a recent issue of the journal… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 22, 2009 at 10:29am — No Comments

Focusing the Mind's Eye - 3 Essential Visualisation Techniques

A mastery of visualisation techniques is one of the most important skills you can possess, but it's a skill that many people believe they don't have. In reality, everybody visualises, all of the time. Everything you do, from getting a pint of milk out of the fridge to driving a car, is visualised first. It's just that most of the time you're not aware of it. By consciously taking control of this, you increase your ability to learn and to act in more beneficial ways.

When you vividly… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 21, 2009 at 10:43am — No Comments

An Interview With Duane Michals: Photographer Or Metaphysician?

What if a camera could capture death? Or desire? Or jealousy? More than any other photographer, Duane Michals has spent his career pushing the medium of photography to capture the metaphysical. We'll talk to Michals about what motivates his photography.

HOST / PRODUCER — ANGELA CARONE, MAUREEN CAVANAUGH

November 4, 2009

MAUREEN CAVANAUGH (Host): Welcome back. I'm Maureen Cavanaugh, and you're listening to These Days on KPBS. Cameras take pictures of… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 20, 2009 at 10:46am — No Comments

My Mind's Eye

Meaning

One's visual memory or imagination.

Origin

The concept of us having an 'eye in our mind' is ancient and dates back to at least the 14th century, when Chaucer used it in The Man of Law's Tale, circa 1390:

"It were with thilke eyen of his mynde, With whiche men seen, after that they been blynde."

The first actual mention of mind's eye comes in 1577 when Hubert Languet used it in a letter. This was subsequently printed in… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 19, 2009 at 12:20pm — No Comments

Hand-eye Coordination and Visual Discrimination Key to Literacy

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your child's early literacy development is simply to let them play. Turn off the TV and anything battery operated then let your child pick up their toys, build blocks or duplos, or manipulate puzzles or game pieces. Not only are you giving your child the gift of childhood, something we so often fail to do in today's hectice, achievement-oriented world, but you are actually helping them build skills that are key to learning to read and… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 18, 2009 at 11:34am — No Comments

Brain-Based Learning: Possible Implications for Online Instruction

Abstract

As higher education institutions push for more online courses instructors are faced with issues and challenges related to teaching in the online learning environment. Regardless, of whether higher education’s impetus is fueled by cost-saving measures, or the belief that online courses answer the challenge of rapid tuition increases or changing student body, one issue that continues to resurface, concerning online courses is to how best to deliver the information and… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 15, 2009 at 10:26am — No Comments

The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program for Treating Adult Dyslexia

The Lindamood Phoneme Sequencing Program (LIPS) is a popular method used to treat dyslexia in adults. As the name implies, this program uses phoneme (the smallest segmental unit of sound used to form meaningful contrasts between utterances) awareness to make dyslexia patients learn how to read effectively.

Weak Phoneme Awareness

According to the LIPS program, the primary reason why dyslexia patients cannot decode and spell words is because of difficulty in judging… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 3, 2009 at 9:57am — No Comments

Visual Perception

Any inventory of the animal world quickly reveals a bewildering assortment of visual systems evolved for the purposes of detecting and using information from reflected light. These range from elementary photoreceptors that only discriminate light from dark, to the considerably more complex interactions of eye and brain responsible for visual perception in birds and mammals. This ability of nervous systems to construct internal visual representations of the outside world represents one of the… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on December 1, 2009 at 11:02am — No Comments