In this day an age students need to have visuals to help explain a concept or express one’s thought. I am glad to see software and research help push this method out to educators. I would like to see this software in action. Thanks for the info.

Nat

Have no “fear”– Bryan and I have long wishes to do more effort in this area, be it more workshops online stuff, writing, who knows. It may become a non-linear web 2.0 ARG story about non-linear web 2.0 ARG stories (uh oh, entering the realm of recursion with Harry Mudd…)

FWIW, I think all narratives have two arcs, corresponding to the way in which our own self-narrated existence takes shape in our own minds. One arc is the chronological one, since cause-and-effect require chronological order, and without cause-and-effect we have chaos. The second arc exists in memory and imagination, where lines/arcs are being drawn and redrawn very rapidly, not to signal cause-and-effect but to intuit larger patterns of relation, of meaning. In this way, metaphor becomes a narrative, I think. Every time we perceive (meaningful) relation, we are storytellers.

Obviously I need to think all of this through, and of course I could be full of beans–but I think that narratives are always and never simply linear, no matter what the medium. It’s just that storytelling in things other than words foregrounds other ways of imagining sequence and arc, and makes the dual nature of narrative (in-time and out-of-time) more apparent. We’ve used language to tell stories for so long that we’ve become forgetful of the dual arc-making….

I REALLY wish I’d been in that workshop. Between Bryan and you, I’ve got a bad case of jumpy neurons. Or a good case. Time will tell.

Helping others see what you are talking about can be a powerful communication advantage, and understanding how visuals and images work can make all of the difference in the world in achieving it. This and many others interesting insights, at……