What you see and hear is filtered through who you are. Each person has a different perspective. Your perspective can be influenced by the physical environment: where you are standing, the weather, or the time of day. It can also be influenced by one’s mood, by cultural filters, or by past experiences. When you understand what you think and feel and even see and hear is impacted by human experiences, you begin to understand how difficult it is to arrive at pure fact. Technology has an opportunity to impact human ways of knowing, thinking, and expressing.

In this Discussion you will experience the same story in multiple formats: the written word, the spoken word, and video. When you begin to add photos or manipulate images, is this changing your experience or enhancing or distorting your reality? Reference content from Week 3 Notes and Readings in your Discussion post.

Graphic Credit:Microsoft Corporation. (Producer). MP900302922 [photo of business people and shadows]. Retrieved February 6, 2014 from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.aspx?qu=see&ex=1%20-%20ai:MP900302922|#ai:MP900302922|

To prepare for the Discussion:

• Return to Week 3 Notes and Readings and review Saki’s The Open Window (written and audio), Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman? (speech and performance interpretation), and the two forms of the Omayra Sanchez story (written and written with pictures).
• Think about your reaction to the different forms of each resource and what it might mean for you as a learner.
• Consider how humans use their perspective to understand new experiences by imagining details of a story.
• Since technology has made it easier to share visual versions, does that impact our need to “see to believe” or influence how easily we understand without a visual?
• Have you ever had the experience of being given false information about a new situation?  Or changing your mind about something with growing evidence?

Prompt A

Consider the imagery you created in your mind as you interacted with the written version of The Open Window.  Describe this imagery and discuss whether it helped you understand the story. Did the imagery or imagined tone change when you listened to the audio?  How? Which medium did you enjoy the most?

Now, do the same exercise with Sojourner Truth’s speech in text and as interpreted by Cicely Tyson in video form. Which medium did you prefer and why?

Comparing the forms you preferred in each case, what might that tell you about how you learn?How is a story, a painting, or a song a kind of virtual reality?