{"id":14825,"date":"2021-11-05T09:16:44","date_gmt":"2021-11-04T22:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/?p=14825"},"modified":"2021-11-05T10:57:01","modified_gmt":"2021-11-04T23:57:01","slug":"helping-students-learn-by-using-ancient-memory-devices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educational-innovation.sydney.edu.au\/teaching@sydney\/helping-students-learn-by-using-ancient-memory-devices\/","title":{"rendered":"Helping Students Learn by Using Ancient Memory Devices"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you think of ancient memory devices you might think of a memory palace.<\/strong> This is a memory device used by memory champions to recall, quickly, a set of shuffled cards in sequence. It was a technique used by Roman orators who would imaginatively assign a piece of their speech into a physical building they knew well, such as their home. When they recited the speech, they would imaginatively move through their home retrieving the part of the speech assigned there as they performed. The part of the speech, or whatever you need to remember, can be represented as a person, animal, goddess, or any animated being, interacting with the space in an amusing or surprising manner. The more vivid the image, the easier it is to recall. Information combined with emotion moves to long-term memory.<\/strong> We remember stories more easily than dry facts.<\/p>\n

Our natural memory stores information randomly which makes it difficult to retrieve. Allocating information to a filing system makes it easy to retrieve. That is the principle of using memory palaces<\/a>: it trains our memories.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are many more ancient memory devices that we can use and encourage our students to use.<\/strong> We can call these mnemonic technologies. These were taught in ancient times, in the medieval period and the Renaissance. We can consider resurrecting their use to help students today.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Orality<\/h2>\n

Imagine you live in an ancient oral culture. Try not to think about oral cultures as lacking literacy but as fully functioning rich cultures; they didn’t know they lack literacy.<\/p>\n

How does your tribe communicate important information? How is the knowledge of the tribe, knowledge about how to live, how to hunt for food, how and when to trade with other tribes, how to resolve problems, how to perform rituals to honour life events, genealogies, taxonomies of plants and animals, pharmacopoeia and timekeeping, how to navigate across deserts or oceans, how is the information communicated? How is it passed down from one generation to the next?<\/p>\n

This knowledge may be embedded in memory devices which might be physical, like rock paintings, statues, totems, decorative art on masks or bowls, it could be told through dance and song, or might be related orally through language and stories. They created storage devices for information with layers of information, indexed and retrievable, taught in layers upon layers in a structured manner to each new generation. Knowledge was secret and protected, restricted to the initiated.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s think about the range of ancient memory devices and then consider how we can use them to help our students learn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We might categorise these mnemonic technologies as different types of encoding or inscribing information: through language, through performing arts, on small objects, and in our environment. A leader in this field is Lynne Kelly<\/a>, Australia’s Senior Memory Champion, who has documented her 40 memory experiments and writes that Indigenous knowledge was embedded in a concrete reality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Encoding in Language<\/h2>\n

All the sayings or slogans or quotes that you remember are memorable by design. In an oral culture, this could mean the difference between life and death. For example:<\/p>\n