Activity 6: Blog Reflection

Reflect on the Method of Loci in your blog. What worked? What didn’t? How could you use such a cognitive activity, mental or visible to users, to improve the acquisition of knowledge in your designs? Write a blog entry on this.

Reflect on the implementation and evaluation: What changes will you make before implementation? Why? What did you ignore in the client’s feedback? Why? What did you ignore in your peer’s feedback? Why?

Listen to this story.

The idea of visualizing an environment and storing ideas in it is something I’ve seen in several fictional works. I’ve always thought it was an amusing concept, but I never pursued it as something I would implement s a memorization technique. Being walked through the process of stepping into a fictional world and storing ideas as objects in it was intriguing. I read through the process a couple of times and thought I was ready to try.

As I closed my eyes and focused on the world, I quickly realized that this is how I fall asleep at night when lay down. I lay down and step out of my body and into the dream world where I can pretty much do anything. I’m usually reacting to scenarios that my brain is conjuring up, but I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to target a room before. As I tried to focus on the task at hand, I heard, in a loud voice, “Ray, I thought you were doing your homework!” I open my eyes and explain to my wife what the assignment was. She laughed hysterically at me, and I questioned her laughter. As she walked away, she said: “you were definitely sleeping.” “I was not,” I snarkily replied as I got comfortable again, set my phone alarm for 15 minutes, and closed my eyes.

Almost immediately, I appeared in front of a door in the middle of a massive white space; like something out of the Matrix movie. The door was a black wood door with white trim around it. As I stood in front of it, I took the suggestion from the article and imagined a couple dozen faces around the top edge of the doorframe. I remember thinking to myself, “I got this,” as I pushed open the door. The door slowly opened to a dark room. As I stepped through it, “Ray, you’re asleep again!” “No, I’m not,” I replied. “Really, then why is your alarm going off and you’re not moving to turn it off,” my wife questioned? I looked at my phone on my chest, and in this instance, I began to hear the alarm going off.

I tried two more times to enter the room, but I don’t recall what happened. After a short while, I just woke up and realized that I had definitely been asleep. I decided that I would need to be more well rested in order to try to use this method. I do vividly remember the black wooden door with white frame and cherub-like faces looking at me. I feel like the method might work quite well without interruptions, and with more time to be sequestered to my solitude.

Implementing this in IT Instructional Design

Part of this blog post is to think about how to implement something like this in instructional design. I imagined having the learner close their eyes and imagine themselves in a server room. I would describe the server room to them in detail and have them walk up to the terminal. “Now imagine yourself logging in to the server,” I would say … okay, this just got much less cool. This is going to take a lot of thought…

References

• (2013, November 8). Schwarzwald (The Black Forest), Germany [Digital image]. Retrieved July 7, 2018, from https://www.topinspired.com/top-10-book-story-magical-places-on-earth/