The Future of Education

With the incredible raise of the data and its accessibility, we are living a cognition shift era. The knowledge needs of our society are changing, we no longer require the deep memoria verborum -as it was established by ancient rhetoric- we needed before, but more than ever, we do need to strengthen the ability to make connections and to be able to integrate various pieces of the available information.

Thanks to modern science we also have a more clear view of the learning chemistry of our brains. But despite the different demands and the more in-depth knowledge, the teaching has only slightly changed. Essentially, we are still teaching to the learners, kids or lifelong learners, the same way we were doing it 50 years ago, 100 years ago. That is to say, we never abandoned the cognitive shape of the written page, the traditional idea of knowledge linked to literacy.

Nowadays, many current trends in education are focused on the new technical possibilities to confront this challenge. However, real teaching seems to be always going after theory. Updating the tools is a completely appropriate way to teach, but it won’t really change the way we learn/teach if we are basically keeping the same method. Our purpose is, thus, to put into play the new digital possibilities to rethink the way we teach in order to actually face the challenge of today.

Re-inventing the wheel is not necessary though. For centuries, from the Ancient Greek Rhetoric to the invention of printing, people have used the power of connections between pictures and the stories behind them –the so-called “iconic literature”- to understand, integrate and memorize data. Furthermore, modern science proves it to be a perfect way of doing: the creative section of the brain needs to be involved in the learning process so that it is not just a passive procedure. Listening or reading information already organized by others is less efficient than stimulating your brain by giving him pictures and stories which are not a support to Literacy, but the real content. In this way, we would be letting the brain make the links by itself, and so the learning process would involve not only literary cognition, but also a more creative, mnemonic, and enjoyable way to learn (based on the memoria rerum).  

The purpose of this paper is hence to present some incipient methodology and applications that could illustrate this new technique by using the cognitive chances of digital data: creating, sharing and transferring visual content and stories.