Week 7: The Importance of Clear Representation

The fact that tablets allow for more efficient representation of math seems to be nothing short of revolutionary. I really liked how the speaker built his argument by showing us how math was done before the printing press, it was able to make the contrast between what we grew up learning and the potential of teaching and learning math in the future.
This made me think of how efficiency of representation is a driving force in learning. Is it fair to say that the more “loaded” an informational representation of content, the better it will be for the learner (assuming the representation is logical and not overwhelming)? I can’t help but think of infographics when it comes to learning something, and how effective they can be for representing a large amount of information at once. Bottom line: representation matters for learning.
On a personal note, I realized that I HAVE to write down notes by hand and HAVE to do it in color using erasable and neat pens. This is so important to me that I am almost unable to learn if I don’t do this. I realized after this talk that by organizing this representation, I am effectively organizing the information in my brain.