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TAG -- Teaching Using Animations in Geoscience

Graphical images help us convey spatial information. Animating the graphics allows us to consider space over a period of changing time, to examine objects from multiple perspectives, and to perceive underlying processes. There is a great deal of information available to us in animated geological visualizations.

We use animations in teaching to help convey complex concepts that would take a long time to describe verbally. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. So, an animated image must be priceless.

But how do students make sense of animations?  There are conventions to be mastered, scale to consider, and challenges in seeing how the elements in the visualization maps onto the real world. On top of these more general issues, there are the specific geology concepts depicted in the animation. Students need at least rudimentary understandings of the concepts of visualization to engage with the animation.

Ironically, we select animations to make learning easy and to convey a great deal of information at once, but there are cognitive challenges in making use of them. On this site, we discuss the specific cognitive challenges faced by students when presented with animations. Some animations are annotated in great detail as learning tools.  Others are simply "tagged" with notes about the cognitive concepts involved in learning from them.  Cognitive lessons learned here may then be applied to the "fire-hose" of animations available for use in teaching geoscience concepts. We are hopeful that these tools will help both faculty and students develop successful strategies to learn from graphical animations.

NOTE: Please access this website using Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera, i.e. a browser other than Internet Explorer!  We are workigng on fixing the IE problems.