It’s been a busy month, in which I’ve been at the Interdisciplinary College (IK) in Günne, Germany. I presented some of my PhD work there (keep an eye on my science page!), and learned a lot about things I was previously pretty naive about. An amazing series of lectures taught me about sign languages – how they are different (or not) from spoken languages, and from each other. Another cool thing was listening to some talks about songbirds, and multimodality in song learning. I learned more about virtual reality too, and about transcranial magnetic stimulation, cognitive models of mind wandering, and how sound can affect how we experience food (compare crunchy to non-crunchy chips for instance).
One of my personal highlights was a talk by Katharina Rohlfing, who talked about explainability. As Rohlfing argued, explaining something takes two parties: both the explainer and the explainee have to be actively engaged for knowledge to be effectively transferred. Current, easily clicked away notifications are not sufficient – we should aim for understanding instead. As for how that can be achieved… Well, the audience had some ideas: Video game tutorials do very well in actively engaging the user in the learning process. Whether that will be practical remains to be seen, but I very much like the idea.
Overall, I came back from IK with many more ideas than I went there with, and with the satisfying feeling of being immersed in science for a good week.
While I was away for some of the month, and occupied with other activities for most of the rest, I did make some website-progress: I updated the about me page. There is even a picture of me, trying to photograph some cool crabs! I might still add more to it, or change it a bit. It’s always a bit strange to write about yourself, but after writing a bunch of job application letters, it’s refreshing to do this in a completely free-form way, and with a bit of humor. Something to keep in mind for the future!
