Graham's Blog

Geraldine Gray

Our fist guest speaker for out working in digital media module was Gerladine Gray on the 8th of February. Geraldine is a lecturer at the ITB and is part of the Informatics department.

Her lecture was all about learning styles and how they differ from person to person. There are certain ways that people take in information and we all fall into a different category. Geraldine linked this to Digital media as it is very important to cater to the different ways in which people take in information when designing something that delivers a message or some content. At fist I didn’t think this lecture would hold any relevance to digital media students but soon discovered it’s importance and how it is something we will all have to work with in the future.

Geraldine told us about the different learning styles. She only touched upon a handful of them considering there is more than 60.

Geraldine told us about the following ones.

• Learning Channels: How we take in information
• Cognitive Strengths: How we commit information to memory
• Manner or Style of Learning: How people process information to understand it
• Personality Type Influences: How you personality effects the way you learn
• Types of Learning Behaviour: Different types of intelligence

Learning channels are broke into 3 ways in which we take in information. The three catagories are Visual, Kinaesthetic and Auditory . Visual is to do with site, Auditory with sounds and Kinaesthetis is to do with touch and movement. She then went on to tell us how each group learns best and even what each group performs best at. For example Visual learners are better at things like dressing well and remember things and colours while Auditory learners are good at working with words and languages and remembering names. Kinaesthetic learners on the other hand are good at Sports and competition. Each group has it;s own strengths and weaknesses.

Geraldine then gave us a number of multichoice questions to determine which learning channel we fall under.

She then told us about Cognitive strengths in learning. After this she talked about how personality can effect learning, I found this part of the lecture very interesting. After a series of tests to determine which personality type we fell under she gave us the full list of them and went through some of them.

Geraldine then talked about learning styles, this was all about how people approach learning situations.

Geraldine finshed her lecture by talking briefly about learning behaviors.

Overall I enjoyed the lecture more than i though i would and learned a lot about how people learn and how things as obscure as personality can have a big impact on how you learn. This was something that I never really thought about before hand.