One Less Reason to Keep Brick Open

Ha, from the Boston Globe today:

Just over two weeks ago, residents saved the Brick School in Franklin from closing, decrying the loss of America's oldest continuously operated one-room brick schoolhouse. They later discovered that the Croydon Village School in Croydon, N.H., is also brick, also one room, and has been open since 1780, 12 years before the Brick School.

and then

Franklin officials learned their lesson the hard way. On June 12 , fighting to save the Brick School from cuts, School Committee chairman Jeffrey N. Roy called the school the oldest continuously operated one-room brick schoolhouse in America. Then a resident e-mailed him pointing out the Croydon Village School.

"I said we would certainly look into it," Roy said. "That certainly was not a driving factor for everybody, whether it is in fact the oldest. I think the important point to it was that it was a piece of town history and many generations had gone through the Brick School."

While it may not have been for everybody, it seemed like everybody for it mentioned that first. Second will now have to be good enough!

PowerPoint Tip and Cognitive Theory

According to the article in InformationWeek's IWDaily newletter:

PowerPoint's hypnotic effect is no coincidence, according to an Australian researcher who found reasons why the Microsoft software-generated slide presentations put spectators to sleep.

The brain simply isn't wired to absorb information in two simultaneous forms as well as it takes in one type of information. Processing the written and spoken word at the same time creates quite a challenge for the mind, according to John Sweller, a researcher from the University of New South Wales.

So who is this John Sweller?

A google query brought up this wikipedia entry where I find out that he is known for an informational theory called "cognitive load".

In my simple terms, I understand cognitive load to be an explanation of how the brain processes information. There are three terms related to this theory.

1. Intrinsic cognitive load - that which is inherent to the topic (presenter has no chance of altering this), the presenter can split the explanation of the topic into schemas and subschemas and have one build upon the other to paint the full picture
   
2. Extraneous cognitive load - when describing a square with words vs. drawing a picture, the words are extraneous
3. Germane cognitive load - the manipulation of the schemas and subschemas in telling the story

Interesting stuff.

The next time you have a chance to do a PowerPoint, keep it simple!

book quotes coming

You are likely to notice that this during week there will be several quotations from This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin. I just completed reading the book and when going through it found so many sections to mark up that I won't possibly be able to use them all in the forthcoming book review. Hence, I'll sprinkle them in individual postings here, at Tertiary Education and at Passion for Good Customer Experience to use them up. The quotes are simply too good to leave sitting alone in my notebook.