How to prepare students for synesthesia

In the context of this course, we call synesthesia, the ability to learn from various different media to obtain meaning provided from multiple types of sources: audio, text, video, data sets & their manipulation, tactile, visual, etc.

What intrigues me, is how do we prepare students to be able to manipulate all sorts of media, and specifically, to manipulate data sets.

I have worked in IT for many years, and I am intimately familiar with the use of Office products, for example: EXCEL, WORD, etc. However, is we are asking all types of students to learn a subject where the information needs to be manipulated from a table, I am concerned that they would need some preliminary training in how to use certain tools to do this, such as PIVOT Tables. For example, if I ask a 10 year old child to manipulate a table in excel, they may intuitively know a few things about it, but some of it would need some explanation or help, which would detour them from the topic they are trying to learn for a few minutes or hours.

If I ask an older person to do this, someone who has not had to work with tables in the past, the explanation could take days, and would affect how quickly they can perform the learning task.

Older Learner

This article discusses how to help seniors learn basic computer skills. This would need to be a basic course, if our target audience for the course are seniors. (1)

I believe that some materials, like manipulation of data, embedding videos in word processors, making files small enough to be able to post them in a file for a discussion forum, may need to be taught prior to some kinds of multi-modal / synesthetic learning can take place. Much as a child must learn how to read and write, prior to starting to learn from a text-book in traditional education. However, this does not mean that synesthetic learning is not appropriate for certain ages, it just means that the type of content needs to be carefully evaluated and may have to be presented in a different way (like a picture of a table in our prior example), for certain audiences.

References

https://coursemology.sg/blog/how-to-help-seniors-learn-basic-computer-skills/