Visual Learning

The Fed Ex Arrow. Can you see it? >>>>>>>>

This feature appeared on 60 Minutes in January 2004
It is posted here to help teachers remember that there are other ways of learning... often without a textbook.
The Eyes Have It
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 4, 2004

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to take a class at Harvard, you're about to find out from one of the university's most distinguished and popular professors. But don't worry, he doesn't teach advanced calculus or nuclear physics or ancient Greek literature.

In fact, if you were the kind of student who spent all your time staring out the classroom window, then Professor John Stilgoe's class may be just for you -- because looking around is exactly what he teaches. Correspondent Steve Kroft reports.
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”I just like to meander along, with or without my students, and just look,” says Professor Stilgoe, who teaches the art of exploration, and discovering the built environment - everything from architectural history to advertising and design. He introduces his students to a method of discovering a hidden world that's always been right in plain view.

“I start by showing slides of things that they think they have seen, and it turns out they haven't seen. The white arrow that's on the side of every Fed Ex truck is a nice place to start. Almost everybody's seen a Federal Express truck, almost nobody's seen the white arrow,” says Stilgoe.

If you don't see the big white arrow there's a reason for it, says Stilgoe. It's because your eyes and your brain have been conditioned to read the letters.

“Before they've learned to read, toddlers will see the arrow. And I've asked toddlers, ‘Do you see the arrow on the truck?’ And they usually do,” says Stilgoe. “The arrow is between the lower half of the capital E, and the X.”

Stilgoe says the arrow is just one of millions of things that are right in front of our eyes that we never notice.

His title at Harvard is professor in the History of Landscape. But his classes don't have much to do with bushes and flowers. He's more interested in the urban ecosystem that has been shaped and repaved over the centuries -- like the vast underground world beneath our feet.

When Stilgoe took Kroft for the kind of walk through Cambridge he takes with students, it turned into a march through the American industrial past – a relic from a long-extinct trolley company, a memorial to the American steel industry.

How long does it take him to get from one place to another?

“It takes me a very long time, and I've started out in perfect confidence to drive to California and I've wound up in Tennessee because things were interesting along the way,” says Stilgoe, laughing. “And if you just kind of wander along like that, following your nose, I mean, you find all kinds of neat things.”

Even if all of this stuff is a world that nobody sees or nobody thinks about.

“I think people see it. But most people, when they learn to read, stop looking around,” says Stilgoe. “I try very hard in this university, which selects students based almost entirely on how well they do with words and numbers, to teach them that there's another way of knowing.”

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This "other way of knowing" is simply using your eyes. The power of acute observation is one of nature's most useful tools for learning. But Stilgoe says the constant blur of the speed of modern life has caused us to lose it over the years.

“I think there are good reasons we've lost it. I mean, I don't tell people to start looking 360 degrees while they're driving a car. But if you were jogging along in a horse and carriage, horse and buggy 100 years ago, you could look around,” says Stilgoe. “I have people now who lead such high-speed lives, they really have never been told to slow down, look around, take a nice walk. Instead they go jogging or running to increase their heart rate. And I tell them, ‘Why not look around while you're doing it, increase some kind of rate in your mind?”

Harvard, he says, has some of the finest students in the world, but he believes most of them are visual illiterates. Their academic lives have been programmed around verbal and mathematical tests that will get them into a good college, but he says they lack a sense of spontaneity.

“I think they've missed a kind of self-guided, non-organized activity, non-sports activity growing up. Wandering around, getting into things. And the assumption seems to be nowadays is if a child isn't in an organized activity, the child is a criminal,” says Stilgoe. “But as far as I can understand, most of my colleagues I work with seem to have found their careers by being slightly disorganized. Lucking into something, you know.”

And this is exactly what happened with Stilgoe, who grew up in a small town south of Boston. His father was a boat builder, and Stilgoe was the first member of his family to ever graduate from college. He came to Harvard 30 years ago to get a PhD, and he’s been there ever since.

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Stilgoe has written a number of scholarly books, on subjects ranging from the development of the seashore to the impact of the railroads on the American landscape. But it's his eccentricity and accessibility that have made him so popular with Harvard students.

Sara Rotman, Lisa Faiman, Agnes Chu and Chris Hunter have all taken his classes.

“As he gives his lecture, it's sort of, can appear as though this is just coming out of nowhere or coming off the top of his head,” says Chu. “But if you read his books, you realize that they're very academically rigorous.”

“And he calls into question so many things that you take for granted on a day-to-day basis,” adds Faiman. “I kind of thought he was just crazy, like the first week of class I was there.”

“Rather than making you a better lawyer, or a better doctor, or teaching you how to be a good accountant, it's a way of living,” says Hunter.

Stilgoe, who teaches in the school of design, devotes a lot of time to the visual media, and to advertising messages that he believes have subconsciously shaped his students' perceptions.

One example he points to is an advertisement for pantyhose. “I can't imagine how it sells pantyhose. And I've given a good deal of thought to the fact that the most atrociously sexist images of women that I can find are in magazines that are aimed only at women,” says Stilgoe.

Another example shows a woman out in a sun-baked arroyo with a nice sink full of water in front of her, while a freight train rumbles behind in the far back. She’s wearing a locomotive engineer’s hat.

“How does an ad like this sell sinks? Does it sell sinks to women? What does the nation's railroad industry think of being depicted like this, right? I haven't a clue. But if you put an ad like this for an hour in a final exam with one direction, discuss, you'll force students to do something,” says Stilgoe.

“I don't think I'll ever be able to look at a fashion magazine again without thinking of him,” says Faiman, laughing. “I used to be able to flip through a fashion magazine in maybe about, oh, half hour tops. Now it will take me several hours. I just can't look at images the same way. I can't just sit down and enjoy my magazine anymore.”
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“This generation of Harvard students gets into Harvard by doing exactly and precisely what teacher wants. If teacher is vague about what he wants, they work a lot harder to figure out what they want, and whether or not it's good,” says Stilgoe. “The vaguer the directions, the more likely the opportunity for serendipity to happen. Drives them nuts.”

Every year, Stilgoe sends his students into supermarkets to study product packaging and product placement. The marketing people leave nothing to chance. And they start going after them before some of them can either walk or talk.

“The design of a package is incredibly important. I tell them to duck walk down the cereal aisle at a supermarket,” says Stilgoe. “And they'll realize that the eyeballs of the figures on the cereal boxes are looking down to the place where a toddler meets the eye, if the toddler's in that little seat in a grocery carriage.”

Stilgoe pays great attention to the psychological power of color in manipulating moods and images. Take, for example, the color of his kitchen, which is apple green.

“Apple green was thought by a number of turn-of-the-century psychologists to be a calming color. And many of them told husbands to have their kitchens painted in that color so that their wives would be happy in the kitchen and not want to be, not want to register to vote and so on,” says Stilgoe. “And nowadays, if you go into the basements of old police stations and mental hospitals, you'll see the apple green color.”

He says that research on the effect of color on emotions continues, but it’s now become a secret science.

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At his farmhouse outside Boston, Stilgoe receives junk mail under a number of phony demographic profiles he's created for himself. He wants to see how direct mail advertisers tailor their message if they think he is an African-American or an Asian. He got the idea from two of his students.

“I had two students who were living in sin, and who were seniors, and discovered that the American Express company had sent each of them a catalog. The interior of the catalog was identical. But the covers were different,” says Stilgoe. “The man got this cover. Every man's dream - a space cadet woman hanging on him and gazing off into La La Land. Her thoughts are his. The woman got this...every woman's dream, a horse. And the males are on the other side of the fence.”

It's all part of Stilgoe's scheme to instill in his students the power of discovery and deduction – to notice unseen things that tell them what's really going on.

All you have to do is go outside, move deliberately, and relax. Do not jog. Forget about weight reduction and blood pressure, and look around.

"I try very hard in this university, which selects students based almost entirely on how well they do with words and numbers, to teach them that there's another way of knowing."
Professor John Stilgoe

© MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Who created the slogan "Visual and Active Learning"?
I don't know. The idea is simple: Most textbooks don't move. Most textbooks are black and white and two dimensions. The Visual and Active

What is the central mission of a Visual and Active Teacher?
ANSWER: The V-and-A Teacher tries to grab the attention of students and engage them in the lesson. Edu-Tainment, which is Education and Entertainment.

The perfect Visual and Active person to observe is Dennis Yuzenas, the Visual and Active Teacher of the Year for 2004
His web site is www.WhatDoYaKnow.com and he creates interesting "books on CD" to engage the attention of students.
Write to him at yuzenas@prodigy.com

An example of a Visual ESOL teacher is Cary Elcome ... correspond with him at bradstow2@yahoo.co.uk

For interesting seminars about how to integrate technology in the classroom and how to infuse Visual and Active techniques into your lesson plans, hire Mr. Mac.

HERE'S AN OFFER
Most consultants want a commitment or payment up front.

I prefer to operate like a store. When you buy an item on a trial basis, you can return the item for a full refund.

When I'm retired, I want to look back at the schools and classrooms where I entered. I'd rather be busy and paid only every fourth or fifth day (giving voluntary workshops) than to work only when I'm guaranteed a check. Let me come into your "village" (your school) and share what I have learned from other Visual and Active teachers.

Dan Coleman, an FBI investigator and a guy who knows how to
His son was a ranger in Afghanistan looking for

The following information came from CNN.

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The al Qaeda ______er
(What should this Headline include?)
By Henry Schuster , CNN
Note: Henry Schuster, a senior producer in CNN's Investigative Unit, has been covering terrorism for more than a decade. Each week in "Tracking Terror," he reports on the people and organizations driving international and domestic terrorism and efforts to combat those. He is the author of the newly published book, "Hunting Eric Rudolph."
(CNN) -- Ten years of hunting for Osama bin Laden, and Dan Coleman only has a brick to show for it.
The brick is from bin Laden's house in Kabul, Afghanistan, destroyed by U.S. bombs in late 2001. It sits on the living room mantel of Coleman's New Jersey home.
But the ex-FBI agent would rather have bin Laden dead than a souvenir.
"It's disappointing to me he hasn't been killed," he said. "I don't normally think like that or say things like that, but in his case there's no other solution. It would be like capturing Hitler. Why would you want to?"
The sentiment is out of character for the normally understated Coleman, who recently retired from the FBI for health reasons after 30 years. But it reflects his strong professional and personal commitment to defeating al Qaeda.
Colleagues called him "the Professor" because of his knowledge of al Qaeda, collecting anything and everything about the terrorist network. When a top suspect came in, Coleman would help lead the interrogation -- intent on getting information that could save lives.
But the hunt for bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders continues -- a job he believes should have been finished by now.
Coleman questions whether U.S. policies past and present have undermined the United States' moral stature, as well as its national security.
A new threat to track
At the end of the Cold War, Coleman was tracking East German spies in New York. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, his new target became Islamic extremists.
"I remember looking at my notes years later, and there was something to the effect that he was a Saudi prince," said Coleman, recalling when bin Laden first came to his attention in late 1994 or early 1995. "That was completely wrong."
Coleman and others soon realized bin Laden was a threat and not, as he puts it, some sort of "Saudi dilettante." By early 1996, he was assigned to a CIA-FBI task force created specifically to track bin Laden.
Coleman's chief responsibility was law enforcement -- to build cases and bring people like bin Laden to justice in American courts.
In 1997, he found himself in Kenya investigating an al Qaeda cell. His unit helped to disrupt some of the cell's activities, but did not prevent the U.S. embassy bombings there and in Tanzania a year later.
Before those bombings, Coleman's task force proposed a mission to snatch bin Laden from Afghanistan. But the plan never made it past the CIA's senior leadership, according to the 9/11 commission.
The African embassy bombings and the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, that killed 17 U.S. sailors should have made al Qaeda's intentions and capabilities obvious, Coleman said.
He believes the U.S. response -- launching cruise missiles at al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and leaving the rest to law enforcement -- should have been more forceful.
"How much clearer did he have to make it that he not only declared war on the U.S., but was trying to carry it out? And then he attacks the U.S. -- it shouldn't have come as a surprise."
Interrogation methods
What happened after the September 11, 2001, attacks did surprise Coleman.
"It was astounding to me after ... 9/11 that we were so ready to give up our laws, our values and everything in order to defend ourselves," he said. "We can't do that. It's wrong."
Detaining "enemy combatants" at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without giving them access to legal counsel is wrong not only for moral but also practical reasons, says Coleman.
If detainees were given access to lawyers from the start, some might have cut deals and offered useful information, he said. And forced admissions are by no means foolproof.
"Any information that's obtained by coercion is suspect," he said. "Because if someone is abusing you physically or psychologically, you pretty much say anything to get them to stop."
Coleman speaks from experience: Before 9/11, when there was a prize al Qaeda catch, he would handle the interrogation. Patience was key to his interrogation methods: Building up trust. Working the relationship. Always in pursuit of the ultimate prize -- information.
"Get them to the point, in the intelligence world, where they commit treason," he said.
Coleman added, "What has come out of Guantanamo that's worth anything to anybody? Almost nothing."
The Pentagon disputes Coleman's criticisms.
Information from Guantanamo detainees has "undoubtedly saved the lives of U.S. and coalition forces in the field [and] thwarted threats posed to innocent civilians at home and abroad," said Bryan Whitman, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.
A personal mission
Coleman comes from a family of police officers. His son Danny is continuing the tradition of maintaining security, in a different way.
The younger Coleman became a U.S. Army Ranger and joined his father in the hunt for bin Laden. That's one reason the elder Coleman didn't retire earlier. He wanted to keep tabs on his son.
Danny Coleman participated in an October 2001 raid in which U.S. special operations forces swooped into Kandahar, hoping to snatch Mullah Omar and other senior Taliban leaders.
Back from tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Danny Coleman plans to serve out the rest of his Army career as a recruiter.
His father is now a full-time househusband, caring for his five children.
But Coleman's desire to eliminate bin Laden and al Qaeda remains strong, as do his beliefs about how the United States has managed and, in his view, mismanaged the war on terror.
"Quite bluntly, the job in Afghanistan wasn't finished when we started up in Iraq," he said.
"This guy killed 3,000 people in New York City. My son was put at risk trying to find him, which is fine because that's his job. I was put at risk trying to get him, that's my job. Fine."
"But he's still alive, he shouldn't be. And the idea that somehow that he should be, that there's still some idea that we're going capture him, we can't wait to capture him -- the hell with that, you know?"
Find this article at:
http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/
2005/US/03/02/schuster.column
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Visual and Active Learning
1. Can you imagine how Dan Coleman said these words?
2. What is Mr. Coleman's view about how to get information from a prisoner? Do you agree or disagree? Explain...
3. Can you "animate" this news report? can you pretend to be a reporter and (with antoher student) pretend to interview Mr. Coleman? Make the lesson ANIMATED, VISUAL and ACTIVE.

Answer:
Actual headline used by CNN:

The Al-Qaeda Hunter
Ex-FBI agent questions policies, stresses catching bin Laden
March 2, 2005

VISIT "BIBBI"
Do you want to do something about making students in other countries know that some people in the USA care about their feelings?
Build International Bridges By Internet

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Welcome to www.VisualAndActive.com

This brick came from a home where Ossama Bin Laden spent some time in Afghanistan.
From CNN March 2005

A comment about dissent and disagreement.

For years I was on one side of the debate about abortion. I just couldn't see why the other side couldn't allow my way of thinking could prevail. Isn't it logical?

Then came the March 2003 war of choice.

As I write this, it's been two years since I realized that my government is not listening to me. :-)

What does a caring person who has a difference of an opinion do? I'm still looking for the answer and I invite you to visit:

Iraq for Iraqis

BIBBI Building International Bridges By Internet

www.WhatDoYaKnow.com and chat with Dennis, who has a more radical view of what we should be doing. I'm not sure.

I just want the war to be over. Well, and for the neighbors of Iraq to figure out something so that there isn't a civil war.

I can't get the faces of 1500 soldiers out of my head.

If you have something to add to this page or to iraq for iraqis, on any side fo the debate, write to me at globalcooling@comcast.net. I'll post items that contain civil language to continue the debate. History is happening here. I wonder sometimes if I am missing an opportunity to take a risk.