Learners have long been classified as auditory, visual, or
kinesthetic. To a large degree, this is
accurate. Learners will either learn
best from what a teacher says, what audio visuals they provide, or the quality
of the hands on experience. Then again,
there are problems with this classification.
Some people are unable to see or hear.
Does this mean that they can only learn via touch and movement? And what role do smell and taste have in
their learning experience?
When it comes down to it, we learn from our senses. We learn from the combination of all the
different sensory mechanisms our bodies maintain, some more than others. This means we learn from text we can read or
touch, visuals we can see, audio we can hear, but more so it means we learn
from all the information our mind and body can consume and digest.
With this multi-sensory approach in mind, the web is the
best and the worst tool for information transference. With the advent of the internet, we have been
able to transmit data to remote areas at incredible speeds. What we have lost is the experiential
learning that spanned all available senses.
To this day, the web is largely text and audio.
Now we have the emergence of richer experiences, such as
flash and video, and quintessential social network tie-in like You Tube and
MySpace. That being said, we are still
in the infancy stage of creating a digital experience that can match the
efficiency of multi-sensory learning. We
must do better.
We must provide peripherals that will allow us to encompass
all the senses. They might allow the
visuals of a digital signal to feed directly into the optic nerve, or audio
signals that bypass the ear's structures.
We must also provide the experiences of touch, taste and smell without
having to involve the body, if we really want to escalate the amount of data we
can dump into our minds.
Ultimately, we need a
better understanding of the way the brain processes data, so we can pass a
signal directly to it.
