Altered perceptions

It's not every day you see the witty and urbane Donald H Taylor, chair of the Learning and Skills Group, looking like a member of Daft Punk. But that's exactly where the Day 2 keynote session of Learning Technologies ended up. Don had no-one to blame but himself for his blushes, mind. The keynote had ended and we were into question time when Don pointed to the hard hat and headphone contraption on the spare seat and asked what it was for. Our keynote speaker, Professor Beau Lotto, said he had only intended to use it if he had time. Don's curiosity got the better of him, and he said there was time, and so Beau used it... on Don. The idea behind the contraption was to show that perception could be manipulated. By adjusting the headphone pipes, he fooled Don into thinking he was hearing noises from one direction, when in fact the reverse was true.

The entire keynote presentation was a little like that. Confusing and intriguing. None of us really knew what was coming next from Professor Lotto, and as he talked, much of what we thought we knew, we began to doubt. Through a series of optical illusions and challenges, Lotto demonstrated that our eyes and brains can be fooled. Visual perception is everything, he declared, and it is made up completely from the light that falls on our retinas. We use not only light but also colour, to perceive our environment around us and extract enough information from it to act decisively. Perception is grounded in our experience, he says, because our brains take meaningless information from the real world and make meaning out of it. This is filtered by our perception, which means that we never see everything that is actually there, we only see what was useful to us in the past. Everything, all of our experience, says Lotto, begins with individual perception. But there lies the problem. If we are only ever behaving according to our perception of previous experiences, he asked, how can we ever learn to behave differently? Participating in science, he believes, changes our perceptions by challenging our beliefs, previous experiences and expectations.

Beau Lotto has been working in schools, getting children involved in research into learning through science experiments. He presented this work alongside one of the school children, Amy O'Toole (one of the youngest published scientists in the world - big up to Blackawton Primary School in Devon!), in a recent TED talk on children as scientists. The bottom line here is that science is for everyone, and there's nothing wrong with starting a scientific puublication with the words 'Once upon a time...' Here's the video below:



Lotto went on to discuss learning through uncertainty. All learning begins with questions, which arise from uncertainty. The only way we can ever do anything new, is to step into uncertainty, and ask questions - this is the basis of science. It is also the basis of play - and learning through play is a very powerful activity. It is intrinsically motivating, because it celebrates uncertainty (if you don't know who's going to win, it's exciting), it's open to all possibilities, and it helps us to become more adaptable to change. Games are just like scientific experiments, and we can change our perceptions, learning from both. The benefits of this for educational practice are undeniable. Small questions can lead to big discoveries.

Photo by Nick Shackleton-Jones


Altered perceptions by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.