From personal experience I have dealt a lot with both, but never really thought of which one was better for me. Most of my teachers began using a lot of funny pictures and little jokes because of what the class as a whole likes. (This relates to what Postman talks about, in which people want to receive information as entertainment.) However, text is all around me while I learn, and because of this I was able to learn through articles and books with just text, and also through power points and videos where there are visual and audio aid. While learning with pictures I was distracted and didn't even look through articles. I found that I could not focus and that my train of thought was scattered, waiting for another picture or snippet of a video. While reading with just text I had no choice but to read through it all, not risking to miss any important piece of information. This factor kept my focus locked into the article, where I actually read through all of in and soaked in all the information, instead of trying to skip over everything so I could talk to my friends about the picture.
After reading his statement, and thinking about my own preference, I began to think what others preferred, and if it was just me that felt that way. Please leave your opinion of what way you prefer to learn!
Personally, text is a preferred method of study and memorization for very similar reasons that you stated. However, music and video can be good complements to text-based studying, but should not replace it. Our minds are very easily distracted, and I feel like too much entertainment can take away from the educational material, which, at the end of the lesson, is the most important component of studying in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI rely mostly on text to learn as well, but I also think audio and visual aids can be helpful. For example, in history class, I created my own parodies of popular songs to help me remember dates. Songs made the dates stick in my head. It probably would have been harder for me to just straight-up memorize the dates, but if the tune of "It's a Small World" was running through my head with revamped lyrics during a test, I wouldn't forget the info (or be able to get the song out of my head for the rest of the day!) Also, in chemistry, our teacher assigned us videos to watch, and this helped me to be able to connect a scientific principle to real life situations. However, Daryl, I also see your point. Pictures can be really distracting in textbooks. I guess for me, I want the audio-visual aids and text separate. I want to be able to learn using just the text, then use audio-visual aids to memorize and connect.
ReplyDeleteIt's getting harder and harder to rely on text with television and the internet. it may be better to retain information by looking at text but i can think of many people who would rather google it. However this isn't a bad thing as using the internet is very different. whether its good or bad it is becoming a major pat of daily life. learning text is becoming outdated.
ReplyDeleteI see that I'm the odd one out here, but I much rather prefer visual learning to just reading text. I need the information to entertain me, so I guess I'm part of the whole population that's been tainted by the internet and social media. I would also be that small population of students that would pass using visual and audio learning. While reading text, I tend to get bored and annoyed. Visual learning is more my style.
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