I plugged the search “visualizing a text” into Google as I thought about remediating my teachnology philosophy, and found the article Brain Movies. It focuses on younger students and language learners boosting comprehension by visualizing what they are reading. Useful, but not what I’m doing. Exactly. In my case, I am creating a bit of a movie of slides, but more so out of concepts than what a young reader might be doing in a fiction or nonfiction world of concrete objects. But still, the technique can apply.

It is interesting how trying to tell the same story in a different medium, or with a new set of constraints, makes you have to really get to the bottom of what you were trying to say in the first place. I’m working on a series of slides that show a progression of involvement with technology vis-à-vis students and teachers. But I know that there is more to my philosophy written in my text version. Part of my philosophy deals with how we interact with technology through time, so it can become a “brain movie,” but other pieces are more static perceptions. How they will get translated into images is a mystery to me yet, but I don’t doubt that it can be done. The process of distilling my thoughts down to images that someone else should be able to successfully “translate” is a challenging and useful process in the understanding of my work myself.

On a side note: I’m not the most creative person, and am certainly not an artist, but I do enjoy creative processes. Reworking the text into a visual is fun for me. I can see how this assignment would be really difficult for some students. Maybe even more difficult than writing the philosophy in the first place. This is a great way for us to get students to stretch themselves and their abilities, maybe not with the content of the course per se, but with the abilities they believe they have.