Blog Post Four.

  For this week's blog post, I wanted to talk about Siegel and their thoughts on the benefits of transmediation. Concerning transmediation, I also wanted to talk about how it is different from verbocentrism.  I felt like this topic was the most relatable since my peers and I have grown up in school using both of these approaches. From my interpretation, the author is arguing that we need to switch our learning systems to transmediation. Transmediation is the process of translating a sign's meaning to another sign(Siegel 455). In simpler terms, the act of transmediation is more of a creative application process. To me, it felt like the act was more about building off a concept to make a new one, rather than just regurgitating information. Siegel gives a great example of students using transmediation to learn about the food chain. The student drew a series of pictures and consistently built new ideas (from the same topic) in each subsequent drawing(Siegel 468). Using this learning method, students can creatively apply what they have learned to another topic, strengthening their understanding of the topic. The other form of education talked about in this article is verbocentric. The author talks about how this system is a word-based learning system that relies on language to teach(Siegel 456). The author argues while this is more common, it is less effective than the transmediation method.

Now that I have gone over the basics of the article, I want to reflect on how both concepts have been used in my academic career. I feel like the bulk of my education has been done through verbocentrism processes. Before college, the main focus was to memorize as much information as I could and then spit it out for a test or quiz. Rather than learning information, my schooling system wanted to see how much information I could retain in a specific time period. I agree with the author that this is a harmful process for the North American education design. I do not want to say that transmediation was not used at all. Instead, I argue that transmediation was not used enough. I feel like the only time I had used transmediation (before college) was in classroom discussion, where we could build off our peers' ideas. I would argue if we had a transmediation focused schooling experience, I would have retained much more of the lessons I was taught. 

Finishing off this blog post, I am curious to hear if my peers had the same interactions in school. Was their academic career similar to mine and focused on verbocentrism? I am also interested to see if my peers experience transmediation or verbocentrism in their college courses. Finally, I also have a question for both my peers and the author. Is there any way to change our school system to a transmediation process, or are we too stuck accustomed to verbocentrism?