VISUALIZATION IN EDUCATION

Support for the Cognitive Processes in Understanding and Learning

Bengt Lennartsson

Department of Science and Technology, Linköping University, Norrköping, Sweden

Keywords: Visualization, Understanding, Learning, Co-ordination, Communication.

Abstract: This paper presents examples illustrating the shortcomings of verbal communication, in particular in new

contexts, within heterogeneous groups, and in complex situations. In a rapidly changing, multi cultural, and

complex world, the words are interpreted differently by different people and at different times. Our under-

standing of the words is grounded in our own accumulated experience, our perceptions from all senses from

different situations. It is a tradition in many academic disciplines to base the teaching and the courses solely

on textbooks and verbal communication. Many project models are based upon delivery of text documents

assumed to convey information, or understanding, from one project phase to the other. Today there are good

reasons and also good possibilities to use visualization, or perceptualization if not only vision is involved,

by means of computer systems to enable better communication and understanding.

1 INTRODUCTION

After being involved in education and research, pri-

marily at the university level, for over 45 years, it is

natural to look back to the collected experience and

to reconsider some of the basic ideas and methods

used. During this period, some novel approaches

have appeared, sometimes disappeared for some

years and then reappeared again. The contents of the

courses, educational programs and research projects,

as well as the aims and methods used, have been

subject to change. Some of the new waves or trends

may have been very local and particular for each

country or each sector. Other may have been more

general and global.

Some of the development the recent decades

needs attention:

 The general globalization and its impact in par-

ticular on small countries like Sweden. Almost

all activities must be multilingual and multi-

cultural and have a global focus

 The complexity of our social, organizational,

and technical systems is at such a level that a

team of experts and practitioners from many

disciplines, sectors, and cultures, is needed to

jointly understand and solve the evolving

problems.

 The development speed. In most cases, you

have to frequently expand what you have un-

derstood and experienced before, to include

new and unknown concepts and components

However, the development does not only create

difficulties and obstacles. There may also be support

and solutions for better understanding and learning.

• The development of Internet where every-

body (at least in the younger generation) is

always connected and available for multi-

media interaction.

• The development of World Wide Web with

Wikipedia, Google, YouTube etc. as com-

ponents in a continuously growing and al-

ways available global multimedia library.

• By means of visualization, maybe in the

shape of 3-D virtual reality, we are able to

make our imagination available to be ex-

plored interactively by others

• Achievements in cognitive science based

on e.g. better instruments like Magnetic Re-

sonance Imaging, MRI, to study brain

processes, and Artificial Neural Networks,

ANN. to model and simulate them, have

enabled an emerging understanding of the

biological basis for the learning and think-

ing processes.

375

Lennartsson B. (2010).

VISUALIZATION IN EDUCATION - Support for the Cognitive Processes in Understanding and Learning.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 375-379

DOI: 10.5220/0002768203750379

 SciTePress

2 OWN EXPERIENCE FROM

TEACHING AND FROM

RESEARCH

There are many situations where text and documents

are the main means to convey knowledge, under-

standing and mental models from one group to the

other, where teaching means to tell the students,

orally or in writing, what is right or wrong, and in

detail what to do, step by step. There are also situa-

tions where we want to focus more on training criti-

cal and innovative thinking, where we challenge

students and stimulate all their senses when present-

ing unsolved problems, questions without known

correct answers, etc. Both approaches are appropri-

ate depending on the subject and on the particular

aims. However, it is my experience that the first, the

truth telling one, is used also in many cases where

the second, the challenging one, should be consi-

dered. This section presents a few such cases.

2.1 The Importance of Shared Visions

and Team Learning

At least three of Senge’s (1990) five disciplines,

shared visions, mental models, and team learning,

have immediate relevance for this subsection. A

longitudinal case study (Cederling 1992) at the Swe-

dish company Philips Elektronikindustrier, PEAB,

(later Celsius Tech Systems) during 1985-2000, fol-

lowed the development of a new command and con-

trol system, SS2000, for a family of naval vessels.

The system should be based on an entirely new

Ethernet based hardware architecture and imple-

mented in a new programming language, Ada, by

means of a new programming environment, Rational

RS6000. In the contracts with the customers, it was

prescribed that a traditional document based devel-

opment model, DOD-STD-2167A, should be used.

This standard forced PEAB to develop a large vo-

lume of specification documents early in the project.

Documents intended to prescribe what to do, when

and how, in later phases.

What was found (Lennartsson 1997), in short,

was that despite the highly qualified team involved

in the production of all the documents, when ques-

tions arose later in the projects, the answers could in

general not be found in the documents, simply be-

cause these questions had not been foreseen by the

document writing teams. Hence, all the files, pre-

scribed by DOD-STD-2167A, were as such of little

value. However, they were very useful indirectly. In

PEAB they found that the team involved in the de-

velopment of the files had the capacity to answer the

new questions rather directly. In the previous discus-

sions they had developed a shared understanding and

established concepts and mental models at the team

level. As the teams were still available within the

company, they could be used frequently to jointly

answer questions and solve problems whenever

needed (Cederling 2000).

Conclusion: The large volume of documents

produced was as such of very little value, but the

effort spent in the development was not wasted, as

the team learning achieved was the very important

major result. However, it was not possible to pack

this capability and carry it through just as texts and

diagrams in the files.

2.2 Managing a Moving Target

Another example of the shortcoming of specification

documents is from Ericsson and their development

of the AXE-10 system generation. In a case study

Lars Taxén (1999) found that in a typical subproject,

8-12 months long, about one third of the require-

ments defined, after careful screening at start-up,

were canceled before delivery. About the same

amount, not even considered when the project

started, had later been added and included in the

delivery. These changes were due to competitor

moves and to the very fast technological develop-

ment in the area, telecommunication networks. The

organizational setting had to be adapted to this very

dynamic situation. The development teams had been

given the responsibility and the power to take the

decisions they considered necessary. Time did not

allow for slow committee decision processes.

Also in this example a capacity and a readiness

of a team is required rather than canned documents

with instructions.

2.3 Communication in Heterogeneous

Teams

A couple of case studies at Whirlpool (Ekinge 2001)

during the 1990s also observed the limits of text and

verbal concepts. During the development of a new

strategy for a development team, the emerging new

vision was gradually manifested by means of dia-

grams, keywords, slogans, and phrases. However,

when a new member of the team was hired, they

found that they had to restart the process almost

from the beginning to enable this person to become

holder of the new vision. The new member didn’t

share the interpretation of the slogans, diagrams,

etc., with the rest of the team. The shared meaning

and interpretations of the concepts used had been

created and established during the previous discus-

sions and were not transferable to the new member.

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2.4 Coordinating Distributed

Mega-projects

The development of the architecture and the compo-

nents of Global System for Mobile communication,

GSM, within Ericsson, was a very big and complex

effort, organizationally as well as technically. Over

10 000 persons were involved all over the world,

and there were a lot of new and yet unknown prob-

lems and solutions to handle. Just as in the AXE-10

projects mentioned above, project management had

to be rather distributed. The top-level management

had to focus on co-ordination and support rather

than to prescribe details in systems and processes. It

became important to establish means for communi-

cation and to enable flexibility and updates in the

meaning of concepts, in the process model, and in

the system architecture. A notion of functional ana-

tomies was introduced and used successfully. Just as

for the cases in the previous subsection, the use of

verbal or language concepts were not sufficient for

the communication or co-ordination, as there was

not any shared interpretation of these concepts in the

new context and in the global and heterogeneous

community of persons involved. The experience

from the coordination of the GSM effort within

Ericsson has been presented in a PhD thesis (Taxén

2003) and in a forthcoming book (Taxén 2009).

2.5 Top-down vs. Bottom-up

Yet another example is from the experience of how

to organize courses in computer programming (Len-

nartsson 2006). Computer programming is rather

unique compared to other subjects I have been

teaching. It is about understanding a lot of new and

interrelated concepts. To describe one of them you

have to use several of the others. The traditional

bottom-up approach is not very appropriate. The

situation is more like jumping into the unknown and

successively discovering the different patterns, and

more and more about how they are related. Under-

standing comes in a very large number of very small

steps, and the student has to take each step

her/himself in her/his own pace. The aim is not that

the student should learn just to understand and copy

programs already written, but to enable the student

to solve new problems by means of entirely new

computer programs (Lennartsson 2004). There is an

obvious similarity with the situation where infant

child is observing the environment and finds patterns

in the perceptions. As there are no existing and un-

derstood concepts to start from, we can’t achieve our

teaching goal just by communicating solutions. A

better approach, in the programming course, is to let

the student experience rather carefully designed sit-

uations. Each student has to start from and build

upon her/his own existing experience and mental

models and develop the new understanding and ca-

pability. There is one more reason for the individual

learning and individual feedback and supervision. It

is my experience that about 10-20 % of the students

are not comfortable with situations where they have

to do things before they know which way to do it is

a correct one. This is a serious disadvantage when

learning programming. The situation where you real-

ly learn is when you have written some code that

doesn’t work, and you are figuring out why it

doesn’t. It is debated whether such a learning style is

in the inherited part of the personality or not. Some

research on twins in relation to the Human Dynam-

ics concept (Seagul & Horne 1997) indicates that

there may be a genetic component.

3 INDICATIONS FROM BRAIN

RESEARCH AND SUPPORT

FROM VR TECHNOLOGY

In recent decades (Sylwester 2007) new tools and

methods have become available to observe and

model processes and basic mechanisms in the brain.

There are different kinds of Magnetic Resonance

Imaging, MRI (WIKI_MRI), to identify areas in the

human brain in different situations and as a result of

different stimuli. There is an increasing understand-

ing of what is going on at the microscopic level; the

electrical and chemical processes taking place within

and between the cells (Sylwester 1995). There is

also a larger and more elaborated modeling of this in

Artificial Neural Networks, ANN (WIKI_ANN).

However, there is still a very wide gap between the

observed behavior and the MRI results at the ma-

croscopic level, and the microscopic phenomena.

Despite this, it is possible to make assumptions and

define hypotheses how our emerging understanding

of the brain processes could influence our view of

thinking and learning.

3.1 VR Support for Shared Visions

When aiming at changing something in a team or in

an organization, the starting point is normally to

create a shared vision of where to go and why

(Senge 1990). In the case studies presented in pre-

vious section, one common success factor for the

teams was the ability to establish such a shared vi-

sion early in the project. If the task is to design a

building, a bridge, or a machine or device of some

kind, a 3D model in a computer is very helpful as a

tool to verify that everybody has the same view. In

VISUALIZATION IN EDUCATION - Support for the Cognitive Processes in Understanding and Learning

377

such a model, or in a simulation of some dynamic

process, the parameters and the structure can be ad-

justed during the discussion in the team. In other

cases different diagrams can be more useful than

virtual reality models. If some parameter values can

be easily adjusted e.g. by means of a slider (Rosl-

ing 2009), dependencies become obvious. Generated

audio can make the “perceptualization” even more

realistic. If applicable, haptic devices can be used.

All this will reduce the amount of misunderstanding

in a team, compared to what could be expected in

case of using only text and verbal concepts for the

communication in the team.

3.2 Thinking and Learning Normally

not by Means of Words and

Language

Many teachers have experienced the value of “learn-

ing by doing”, “use of all senses” etc., in the learn-

ing situation. In the knowledge model by Aristotle,

only episteme was directly transferable, i.e. could be

explained, analyzed and transferred verbally orally

or in writing. Techne was achieved by following and

imitating the actions and behavior of the master, and

phronesis, or wisdom, required a long life expe-

rience and deep and wide understanding.

Most of the processes in our brains, i.e. thinking,

learning, control of actions etc. are taking place

without our explicit control. Most of our behavior,

our actions, our feelings and our beliefs are just

there. We are normally not reasoning or listing ver-

bal arguments for and against different alternatives.

Somehow, the perceptions from all our senses are

taken care of and resulting in actions and behavior.

Automatic reflexes and some responses may be im-

mediate and “hardwired” and not accessible for our

thinking. From neuroscience we have learned that

there may be such short-cuts for stimuli from several

of our senses (Koch 2004). Pheromones (?) (Bear

2006), blind sight (Leh 2006), knee and eye reflexes,

are such examples of subconscious responses.

If we are focusing on education and learning in

this context, it seems as our brain registers percep-

tions and creates patterns and associations, such that

a similar combination of stimuli later can be recog-

nized as a similar situation. This enables us to reuse

the experience from successful or unsuccessful ac-

tions later, i.e. it enables learning. This pattern rec-

ognition takes place at the level of processed stimuli

signals. Recognition of straight lines, shapes, colors,

motion, size, and human faces are examples of

processing vision stimuli. Even if the processing of

the stimuli and our response often is automatic, it is

also often available for our consciousness in case we

decide to interact.

What can we learn from this? The key question

in this paper is about how and what we learn from

reading texts and documents. We can remember and

rephrase sections we have read. Students may get

high grades by remembering and repeating what we

have said or what is written in the textbooks. This is

something they have really learnt during their

course, but what have they understood? How is this

ability to remember text related to the basic under-

standing and the received stimuli in real situation?

I think we all know situations where we our-

selves or persons in our environment have acted

quite contrary to what we/they know would be the

best thing to do. Our internal chemical awarding

system has different criteria than our conscious

mind. Sometimes our automatic reactions, our gut

feelings, are more competitive than our logical rea-

soning. An immediate action may save our life, even

if longer reasoning might have resulted in an even

better action, but to late.

So, even if we don’t understand the details, there

are indications from brain research, that “learning by

doing” and “all senses” are good ideas (Sylwester

2000). Real learning means change of behavior, and

change of behavior means rebuilding the patterns at

lower levels of the cognitive maps. These patterns

are normally efficiently sorting out of the irrelevant

details in the sensory signals, and find matching

recorded patterns. As these recorded maps constitute

our beliefs and values, normally more than words

and phrases are needed to shake them.

There are some FRMI studies on brain activities

triggered by reading words and symbols (Liu 2007).

Persons having English as their mother tongue, read-

ing a word like “house” resulted in brain activities in

the lexeme recognition area and also in the area for

phoneme processing, but nothing more. The situa-

tion for persons brought up with the Chinese lan-

guage, also the areas for the “meaning” of the word

was activated.

Hypotheses:

Text reading and interpretation alone may be a

week instrument for learning. It may work for con-

firmation and acknowledgement of existing beliefs,

but not for relearning, i.e. changing existing beliefs

and patterns. In such cases massive sensory input

from all senses may be needed. Very little of our

behavior, actions, beliefs and values are based on

conscious logical or verbal reasoning.

However, within a monolingual rather homoge-

neous community, standardized symbols, spoken

and written language may be sufficient means for

communicating abstractions and complex relation-

ships between well understood entities and concepts.

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3.3 Coordination of Mega-projects and

Understanding Mega-systems

In many situations, the main problem is not that we

are lacking information and data, but that we have

too much of it to be able to figure out what is rele-

vant and how everything is related. In such situa-

tions computers and visualization are invaluable.

Hans Rosling and his GapMinder (Rosling 2006) is

an excellent example. Mikael Jern and his GeoAna-

lytics Visualization (Johansson 2006) by means of

parallel coordinates is another one.

Rosling’s and Jern’s tools are for displaying

quantitative information. Visualization is also very

helpful for illustration of different kinds of qualita-

tive relations between entities in general. One such

example is the use of Functional Anatomies (Taxén

2009) to update and communicate the state and the

relations between all the entities in the complex

GSM system under development and the even more

complex and dynamic project organization.

The usefulness of all three examples mentioned

is due to their interactivity and that they are designed

for dynamic updates. They are not just means for

generation of visualizations to be printed or studied

as static objects. You can change focus, animate

time dependency, separate categories by color, size,

shape, texture, etc. dynamically and interactively.

4 CONCLUSIONS AND

DISCUSSION

This paper contains some scattered pieces of expe-

rience and some reflections about situations where

text or static documents in general, are not sufficient

to communicate the information needed or to reflect

the current state of the dynamic shared view in a

dynamic organization involved in innovative devel-

opment of complex systems.

The objective is also to argue for using active

learning and use of all senses in educational situa-

tions. In particular at the university level, at least in

my country, I think that the mental models of teach-

ing are too often limited to reading, discussing, and

writing texts.

Neuroscience is still far away from understand-

ing and modeling the learning and thinking

processes, but very little indicates that it is a wise

strategy to base education, teaching and learning

only on verbal concepts.

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