by Derek Morrison, 10 April 2011
If you haven’t come across the RSA Animate resources yet then head there post haste; the site offers many items that should be of interest to digital scholars. To me the RSA Animate resources are an excellent example of how further value can be added to what was once POA or POV (plain old audio or video); we’ll call it reuse or repurposing or “adding further value” if you like. A considerable part of the human brain is devoted to image processing and so it’s tempting to speculate that this type of enhanced podcast (or is it enhanced vidcast?) could tap into our inherent visual memory capability which far transcends our normal concept of memory of seven items plus or minus two. I referred to some of the work done on visual memory in my online essay Ebooks in the ‘e-filling station’? (Auricle, 20 May 201) when I said:
But a large proportion of the human brain is dedicated to image processing, albeit at an unconscious level. There is much written about this but a very accessible illustration of the power of visual processing and visual memory has been undertaken by the well known author and academic Richard Wiseman. For example Wiseman states in his book Quirkology “We don’t process verbal information anything like as efficiently, [as images] so associating names and lists with images is probably a good strategy.†The Quirkology web site also shows the live Total Recall experiment he ran to replicate the original studies undertaken by Lionel Standing in the 1970s. See also Think your memory is poor? Forget it (Times, 19 May 2007) or the VizThink blog.
RSA Animate offers some interesting pedagogical research question for someone to investigate perhaps?
