Text-based learning systems on decline

By ADAM GIFFORD

Students who use computer-based education systems which just replicate text-based systems are missing out on learning.

That is the word from Walter Stewart, global marketing director for the research and education sectors for Silicon Graphics (SGI). The firm is known for its high-end workstations used for graphics applications.

Toronto-based Mr Stewart says too much online learning just reproduces the classroom. Companies need to understand the power of the visual in learning and working.

He sees the decline of the dominance of text as "we move into the world of multisensory understanding." Learning, which has been organised around the conventions of text and its linearity, "will have to be organised differently."

Virtual reality technology is already changing industries like oil and gas, manufacturing and medicine.

In the medical world, instead of just reading scans, some hospitals are taking the digital data and reconstructing three-dimensional views.

Mr Stewart says a university hospital used the technique when one of the university's star athletes had a sore leg which did not respond to conventional physiotherapy.

"They did an MRI scan and found a tumour in the femur. The conventional treatment would be highly invasive surgery through muscle, tendon and bone, and then major reconstructive surgery, months of physio and no hope whatever she would be competitive again.

"What they were able to do by computer-assisted surgery was visualise the leg in the MRI, guide a probe in with a fine needle and suck the tumour out - she walked out of the hospital hours later."

SGI sells parabolic walls, large screens for the three-dimensional visualisation of data, to the oil and gas industry.

Amoco reported that the technology has increased the number of successful wells it drills from 14 per cent to 48 per cent.

"Since it costs them about $C15 million [$NZ22.1m] to drill a well on land and $C40 million [$NZ58.9m] to drill offshore, this kind of improvement is enormously important because the dry ones don't come any cheaper," Mr Stewart says.

"The reason for that improvement is not just the fact the geologists can see the data, but that a number of them see the data together collaboratively and work with it. You are building collaborative intelligence."

That adds an extra dimension to the old SGI slogan: "The key to insight is sight."

Mr Stewart says because that ability to see is changing the way people work, it is important businesses understand visual fluency is different to the fluency of text and notation.

The language of the technology will be developed by those to whom the human-screen interface is natural - the video game generation - rather than by those absolutely educated in the world of text.

He quotes the phrase used by internet philosopher John Perry Barlow in his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.

"Barlow said: 'You are terrified of your own children because they are native in a world in which you can only be migrants.' There are young people who work in these worlds who are in fact native. It's how they are used to seeing things."