English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Watch this video, put the cheesy synth pop out of your head and consider it, not as a cute gimmic, but as a prophesy of the future and past of our educational techniques.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBvaHZIrt0o

It reminds me of old PBS programing I watched as a child, the sort of thing where we'd go behind the scenes of a factory and they'd show us how cheese was made or how books were published. I loved those shows. Indeed, I think they may have had a great influence on the curiousity I enjoy today.

And so I was thinking: This sort of fluid diagraming is a more intuitive way of learning. I'm sure the people who made this video thought they were being random, but I think the visual continuity of this diverse information increased my attention span. I wanted to be able to mouse my way into the movement and explore the diverse information presented.

In a way, I think this also is an excellent example of the potential for such virtual realities as Second Life. Imagine if there were a sister progam, with much more simplified graphics, called EduLife that modeled this video but was interactive. Children would play on that thing for hours. And it could be programed (trained?) to vary the complexity of content for the level of interest, education, experience, age, interactivity of the user. Some kids would want to know any and everything about a cow while others would want to explore the way civil engineering impacts our lives. The same "game" could be used to teach the latest nutritional wisdom, human growth and development, social studies . . . oh, now I'm all excited.