Blog posting #6 Communities of Practice

Ok, I hate to belabor the point, but being a photographer and photography instructor I must confess to overwhelming joy in seeing the following (amazingly in print, not a photo though would be happy to illustrate :) rule. So next time students are tuning out, remember the t shirt, " I do not have ADD, I am bored (or ignoring you)" and try not to take offense but remember the following

Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things. Kids are just a bit less tactful in letting you know this, and obviously have tools to help alleviate this (unless laptops and phones have been taken away). We may help teach them to be a bit more tolerant and polite when expressing their disinterest, thus imparting a valuable life lesson as they continue their educational journey, but ultimately we need to make sure the material we are presenting is done so in a variety of media, something we are truly interested in, and a shared experience.

• What we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by memory. Our previous experience predicts where we should pay attention. Culture matters too. Whether in school or in business, these differences can greatly effect how an audience perceives a given presentation.

in other words, have I seen, heard, sensed this before? Is it safe to tune out since I have experienced this previously?

• We pay attention to things like emotions, threats and sex. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these.
• Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
• We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%. Pictures beat text as well, in part because reading is so inefficient for us. Our brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures, and we have to identify certain features in the letters to be able to read them. That takes time.

I do not believe there would be much of an attraction to social networking sites if there were not photos, graphics, and videos. I am in fact a bit amazed at the attraction of Twitter given the fact that it is mostly text based information, though often links to take us to pages rich in graphic content. Mostly we want, value and need to be part of a community and to share part of ourselves with others. That human fact has not changed, and now we have the tools to do so in the most amazingly efficient and creative ways. I look forward to what people have to share and how it may bring others together in ways we have yet to realize.

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