Dim Sum & Descartes

Recently, the team behind the Dim Sum Warriors comic/app, Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh, invited me along to say a few words on the workings of comics as part of their interview with Patrick Cox of Public Radio International's "The World in Words." The Dim Sum Warriors comic-app is a pretty neat merger of comics and technology - the text appears in either English or Chinese, and with a touch, the reader can see the other language, and another touch - get an audio reading in the other language. It's a fun tale of anthropomorphic dim sum and I believe, an important way to get at literacy in ways beyond what comics already do. Check out the interview on PRI here. You can learn more about the dim sum warriors in app form and in print at their site here.

Patrick Cox was kind of enough to give me the last word on the podcast, and say a couple things about my dissertation in the context of all this. If you want to hear me talk at greater talk length on comics and education, see the recent post for an interview I did with professors at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

In both interviews, I'm bringing up the importance of visual thinking, and getting beyond solely verbal-based thinking and learning. This is the subject of the third chapter of the dissertation, which I'm currently in the midst of drawing/writing/designing. This chpater builds on (and shares the same title) as the piece "the shape of our thoughts," that i did for the Journal of Visual Arts Research. In this new chapter, I want to address the anti-visual legacy that comes down to us from Plato and Descartes, and seek some reunion between the split of mind and body, and specifically - image and text. I'm pretty excited with how it's shaping up, and will share parts of it soon. In the meantime, a fragment from a finished page about "languages..." - Nick

P.S. Teaching two courses on comics this spring - starting end of January - comics for educators course at Teachers College (www.comicsclassroom.wikispaces.com) and a reading graphic novels course at Parsons. Both of which take the approach of learning theory through practice, thinking in different Languages than text...