On 11/21/2009 11:50 AM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>>>>>> "Jimmie" == Jimmie Houchin<jhouchin at cyberhaus.us>  writes:
>>>>>>
> Jimmie>      1. visual learners;
> Jimmie>      2. auditory learners;
> Jimmie>      3. reading/writing-preference learners;
> Jimmie>      4. kinesthetic learners or tactile learners^
>
> Yes, there's that aspect of it as well, which is orthogonal
> to the items I talked about (structure vs concept vs example).
>
> So some people might want visual examples, while others want auditory
> concepts first.
>
> In particular, I'm very non-visual (mostly auditory and kine), so my books and
> writings are very non-visual as well.  I've had to learn to adapt when people
> in class say "yes, but what does an array *look like* in memory", because for
> me, that's something I'd never be curious about, as long as I understood
> (through listening and typing) how to manipulate them.
>
> In fact, not to get too off the subject, but it wasn't until I was 19 years
> old that I had even been exposed to the fact that people can think using
> visual hallucinations, or remember using visual images.  I thought everyone
> talked to themselves in words in their head like I was doing to think or
> remember.  And to this day, visual processing is *very* difficult for me.
> Everything I do, I do with words, not pictures.  Icons that don't have
> tooltips are a *real* pain for me, because I can't associate a direct thought
> with an icon... I have to first try to remember the word the icon represents,
> and then I can remember what that would mean.  ("Scissors?  why would
> they have a pair of scissors on an action bar... oh... *cut*" repeatedly.)
>

I think icons and graphics are great, but they do need to be tied to 
some name, some form of linguistic identification which the icon is 
represents. I generally like icons when I've learned their linguistic 
representation. But I do believe that good tooltips is a must. I think 
the advantage of icons/graphics/images/pictures/etc... is universality 
and terseness. But just like written words and definitions, the iconic 
representation also is learned and is not necessarily natural or intuitive.

I watched a video on Common Lisp awhile back which referenced the 
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It spoke of our ability to remember things based 
on our languages ability to describe the item. In specific it referenced 
a study on the shades of gray and ability to remember based on the 
languages capacity to differentiate/identify the different shades.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=448441135356213813
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I don't believe this is too off topic if really off topic for 
squeak-dev. Since Squeak itself is used for education and this in 
particular instance referencing means and methods of documentation. :)

Jimmie