How visualizations help you learn (and how to use them)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ค. 2024
- Do you create visualizations while you learn? If not, you should. Here's why.
00:00 Introduction
00:31 Three advantages to visualizations
2:15 What should you visualize?
2:59 The cardinal sin
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Image acknowledgements:
The initial three visualizations come from the Dataisbeautiful subreddit. Here are the credits:
Long COVID in the U.S., by MetricT: / oc_percent_of_adult_po...
Brazil's GDP, by Latinometrics: / oc_in_2011_brazils_gdp...
Mandela Effect, by YouGov_Official: / oc_americans_are_more_...
Jacque Minard's famous illustration of Napoleon's campaign grabbed from activehistory.ca/wp-content/up.... Thanks, Active History!
Water cycle image: John Evans and Howard Periman, USGS, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi....
John Snow's map of the broad street water pump cholera outbreak (originally from 1854). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sn....
Causal ecosystem image, from one of Tina Grotzer's papers. Grotzer, T. A., Kamarainen, A. M., Tutwiler, M. S., Metcalf, S., & Dede, C. (2013). Learning to reason about ecosystems dynamics over time: The challenges of an event-based causal focus. BioScience, 63(4), 288-296. academic.oup.com/bioscience/a.... She's an academic who does great work on how students think of causal relationships.
The "argument" image comes from a piece by Deanna Kuhn, a pioneer in studying argumentation. Kuhn, D., Goh, W., Iordanou, K., & Shaenfield, D. (2008). Arguing on the computer: A microgenetic study of developing argument skills in a computer‐supported environment. Child development, 79(5), 1310-1328. www.educationforthinking.org/...
References:
This video was largely inspired by the chapter "V is for Visualization" in the ABCs of How We Learn by Schwartz, Tsang, and Blair. Definitely recommend it.
YEEEESSS!!!! I was hoping you had this video cause i had a strong hypothesis that Da vinci drawing skills (was he a sculptor too?!) was key for him learning so much!!! Cause you can take stuff out of your brain and SEE IT, we count so much on our eyes and on learning by imitation, that drawing HAS to help, be key. And yet is seen as a hobo skill with many people stating as shameful waste of time, but imagine life without maps?! Or footage?! Or writing?
Drawing, animating and even sculting feel so key to life that is frustrating i never learned and arts were so downplayed as useful growing up. There are many moments i wish i could see images and motion outside my head, and fix it, polish it, to boost my progress but i cant. And learning them now seems inviable giving everything else i need to learn.
Nice video, mister, and very useful. Also, congrats for reaching 500 subscribers
Thanks!
This channel have a potential for 1 views and more .... Thank you for the video
Nice, thank you
3:50 Insane how this graph gives me anxiety, reminds me school and im like "I CANT DO THAT!!!!"
I dont even know the principles yet but since looks like previous ones, is confusing and it's tied to terrifying stuff like school presentation i start panicking, it's the Illusory Difficulty/use of Intimidation from game design, cause it LOOKS intimidation it adds an artificial difficulty to it. Insane how those in depth fears groomed with terrible raising really mess up your ability to learn and solve problems later on, creating an instinctual repulse.
Learning how to learn helps you to become a great teacher, and you are a great example of this, subscribed!
@@dylancounte1448 I agree, but I also think that we need to be the change, if we work in our field, we should first teach ourselves how to learn, and how to understand how we personaly like to learn and understand our field, and then try to help others do the same. All starts from one person, and we can only control ourselves, not others. All for the love of mental training and learning
Nice tip
Benefits of visualization
1. Cognitive offloading: brain has to do 2 things when processing information. Creating that visualization eliminates one of those things
2. Visualizations help you see structure in what you are learning about
3. it creates a tangible way for information to manifest, deeply process, and, hence, retain those information in our memory.
@@sonicmaths8285 I think why this is, cuz images are processed really easily by our brain, and it really draws out intuition for any concept
What about using mind maps for this things?
Your video made me understand, why i learn better with mind maps than just a summary in written form. I can place things where I want them to place + I can recognize interdependencies much better, because I have more topics on one page and they are clearer to recognize.
Maybe you can make a video about mind maps?
I love the open source app "free plane" it is super intuitive for me and it is fast.
Quick question. Would outsourcing the process of creating a visual representaton using AI tools be counterproductive? As in, how much of the learning actually takes place during the act of creating something like a mind map or graph, and is it significant enough that using a tool to make a visual would actually lead to losing out on a large chunk of actual learning?
I can tell you my thoughts, but AFAIK there's not much research in this area.
I could see a role for automated AI to assist in the creation of interesting representations. But the more that you have AI take over, the cognitive task changes. So you have the AI creating a bunch of representations and you sitting there looking at them trying to see if they make sense. This is different than you trying to directly make sense of the material.
Another consideration concerns how the AI works. How is it going to be automated? Most modern AI still uses the "training set - test set" model. So the AI's suggestions are some mash-up of things it has seen before. Which might be helpful - you never know definitively what's going to lead to the key insight. But when we're making visualizations (or writing), we are trying to create something new, in a way. I can see giving a visualization AI a discrete task, like "make this graph more striking" or "organize by this, rather than that" or "transform this into a line graph with error bars on this variable".
I could have asked an AI to write this reply, but I'm figuring out what I want to say as I write. Something similar is going on when using visualizations to understand something, IMO.
Is there any benefit to practicing holding everything in your mind, would it improve your working memory?
Hi. When you talk, do you visualize something before saying something?
Not to my knowledge. Does it seem that way? Maybe I'm just thinking of what I want to say.
@@benjaminkeep It occured to me that there are words that I cannot visualize or 'hear' or whatever occured to us as what we call 'ideas'. For example, words like 'concept', 'capitalism', 'reality', 'structure', 'memory', 'understanding', 'self', 'mind', 'goal' I can't visualize, but I can visualize or experience 'brain', 'pencil', 'pain', 'joy', 'anxiety', 'somebody kicks somebody with the knife' and so on. Maybe you can somehow experience 'abstractions'. If so, then how? Just curious. Maybe most of the words we say don't mean anything.
Sorry for never replying to this - I'm sure there is some work on this that I haven't read, but it sounds like this is a reflection of how abstract the concept is (two words right there!). I wouldn't say that an abstract concept is meaningless, but it's very possible for words to lose their meaning (or have little shared meaning) when they aren't tied to specific, concrete things.
We're close to 500 subs 👍🏻
Yep! Thanks for all the support!
from 500 subs to 74k in 1 year; good job, Ben!
What about visualizations as literal visualizations in the mind's eye? Most Westerners are not visual thinkers and think in terms of words. A number of Westerners have aphantasia which is the inability to visualize. They see nothing in their mind's eye. Many people on the autism spectrum are visual thinkers (see Temple Grandin and her books) and many of the best Western innovators were visual thinkers (Newton, Einstein, Tesla, etc...).
The number of people who suffer from aphantasia is very small - although I'm glad that the condition is getting more attention. I wasn't aware of any patterns in terms of number of people with the condition by region or nation.
Certainly visualizations (in the mind's eye) can help people think more effectively. I would go beyond just visualizations, though, to think in terms of enactment, proprioception, scents, sounds, etc. There's an interesting paper I remember reading on how NASA engineers essentially pretend to be Mars rovers to help them think about how to manage the rover.
@@benjaminkeep Maybe and I don't agree as I'll discuss. While 100% aphantasia may be rare, it does exist on a spectrum. Most people are a hybrid of visual and verbal and likely more verbal as the focus. I have hyperphantasia and if you asked me to visualize being on a seashore (forget the Apple which is used), I can smell the sea, feel the wind, feel the sunlight, feel the dampness of the sand, and hear the sea birds. I use verbal thinking as well to translate my thoughts, but it's not my privileged mode of thinking which is primarily visual and intuitive. During Covid, I learned art and it was easier due to my modality of thinking: visual. It's served me well throughout my life both in academia and in the real world.