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Archives of Business Research – Vol. 9, No. 6
Publication Date: June 25, 2021
DOI:10.14738/abr.96.10426. Levintov, A. (2021). Verbalization Vs Visualization: The Issues of Interaction and Communication. Archives of Business Research,
9(6). 214-218.
Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom
Verbalization Vs Visualization: The Issues of Interaction and
Communication
Aleksandr Levintov
Ph.D. (Geography)
Senior Researcher
Moscow City University
ABSRACT
The article contrasts two technologies of distant education and scientific activity:
visual (presentations) and verbal (by correspondence, Newtonian). The advantages
and disadvantages of both technologies are considered, and a preference is given to
writing aimed at thinking.
Key words: distant education, Newton-Leibnitz correspondence, workshop of activity- based technologies, science and education, oral and written speech.
One of the peculiarities of power and governmental practices in this country is that only
unequivocal decisions are allowed, without considering alternatives at any stages, neither
before nor after adopting decisions. Distance teaching enforced within the educational system
due to the Covid-19 pandemic was the result of such unequivocal decision: to be delivered
online with no other options allowed, notwithstanding the fact that there were alternatives
which were probably more efficient in terms of productivity and cost reduction. One of these
alternatives is considered in this paper.
The Covid-19 pandemic that had come upon everybody quite unexpectedly lead to a
catastrophic primitivization in the areas of science, education and university life. A series of
knockout punches:
1. started with replacing oral examinations by multiple choice tests in the desperate
struggle with corruption,
2. continued by turning coherent speech of teachers and students into copy-paste
presentations,
3. and switching from teaching and learning processes to fighting for positions in the
rankings
4. finished with forcing teachers to become engaged in the research activities that
substituted scientific papers with qualification papers where results had been a-priori
known and described and no place was left for ad hoc, surprise or chance.
According to this logic of total visualization, the large-scale transition to online technologies
was another step towards digitalization and turning people into robots and cyborgs.
Basically, the IT industry began to push forward their tools and impose the methods of teaching
and scientific communication. Metaphorically speaking, this resembled a situation when a
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Levintov, A. (2021). Verbalization Vs Visualization: The Issues of Interaction and Communication. Archives of Business Research, 9(6). 214-218.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/abr.96.10426
navigator and an on-board computer decide upon the direction, route and speed of the
automobile while the driver, this semipassenger, is just an awkward and unreliable agent of the
navigator’s will.
We, scholars and teachers, must hold our positions in the research and educational processes
and technologies.
From the 17th century, the time when science emerged (Halileo) [1, 2], the key means of
communication in the absence of scientific journals and conferences was correspondence
between scholars, often sustainable and intense. Correspondence was the opportunity to
debate, define priorities and primacies, refine pro e contra arguments, hold discussions which
sometimes lasted for many years. Being engaged in personal correspondence was a permit into
science which was not easy to obtain and not everyone could do it.
Of course, correspondence was not the only means of scientific communication. From the
substrate of the university informational environment, the professorship who often combined
research and teaching activities, fostered their assistants, helpers who were to become the next
generation of scientists nurtured by regular communication within their departments and
laboratories.
The most widely-known in the history of science was the correspondence between Newton and
Leibniz [5]. This fact enabled our Workshop of activity-based organisational technologies at
Moscow City University [4] to switch to the remote (but not online) mode of communication
which we called Newtonian seminar.
The workshop comprises three theme-based seminars:
- Philosophy of old age
- Methodology of scientific research
- Humanism in education and science
The seminar in Philosophy of old age is organized in the customary online format in MS Teams.
Unfortunately, this format is not at all attractive in terms of teaching.
1. one has to lead the discussion in the impromptu manner (other types of presenting are
not encouraged), simultaneously with following the course of the presentation, keeping
an eye on raised hands and messages in the chat which are often not related to the
discussion, stopping unauthorized behavior of those participants who would switch, for
example, the order of slides in the presentation, as well as watching over the overall
technical state of the system – these are very tiresome and nervous tasks.
2. this format allows participants hide behind their avatars and be seemingly present in
the discussion: one would address the avatar while there’s nobody behind it.
3. there is no atmosphere of empathy, trust and involvement that are prerequisites and
inspiration for free improvisation.
It is remarkable that many people start losing the skill of text writing when they replace reports
by presentations forgetting that a presentation is not an alternative but an illustrative
supplement to the text of the report. A few years ago there even appeared the so called poster
reports – a large and complicatedly-arranged posters that imitate text reports: they are eye-
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catching and impressive, but instead of being communicative they are translative and therefore
require the presence of the author at the poster who would explain the flow of their visual art,
answer public’s questions and queries, etc.
The visuality of online lectures and seminars (webinars) that facilitates comprehension also
works at the expense of verbalisation: we perceive 60–80% of data through vision while the
seeming easiness of visual comprehension aggravates the information flow processing and
identifying the important, the obscure and the new within it. Alas, we often watch a lot of things
but do not see them, do not perceive them intellectually. The pace of verbal communication is
much slower than that of visual communication, therefore verbal communication is more
profound and content-rich.
The seminar in Methodology of scientific research is arranged in the Newtonian style the
following way.
It is divided into several topics.
The participants of the seminar receive by email a full text of a report on the current topic
supplied by appendices (texts that supplement the report). During the following month the
participants are free to comment the report and its appendices by inserting personalized
comments in the body of the text or after it, commenting the comments of others, asking
questions and answering them, and adding to the report by their own reports/presentations.
A month of intense discussions by email between the “corresponding members” is concluded
by a reflective assembly of the flow and results of the correspondence discussion. The materials
are subsequently handed over for editorial and correctional processing, and the participants
move on to the next topic.
Such Newtonian format of the seminar enabled to make it international and involve colleagues
from Ukraine, Latvia, and Estonia in the discussion.
The seminar in Humanism in education which is not scheduled or financed but has existed for
two years already is currently rebuilt into a Newtonian format which is different from the
previous one.
There is a syllabus for the whole seminar (4 sessions held once in 6 weeks, from Friday evening
to Sunday evening, a marathon that lasts for about 27 hours). The schedule of each session
resembles schedules and structural projects of Organisational Activity-based Games and similar
activities1.
1 Organisational activity-based Games (Russian: организационно-деятельностные игры,
ОДИ) originated in the 1970s within the Moscow’s Methodological Club that was part of the
intellectual, philosophical and scientific underground of the Soviet Union. These games involved
about 3 million people (1% of the USSR’s population) and were an important factor of the Perestroika
and “the new thinking” [6].
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Levintov, A. (2021). Verbalization Vs Visualization: The Issues of Interaction and Communication. Archives of Business Research, 9(6). 214-218.
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/abr.96.10426
The seminar starts with an inception report on the topic of the session followed by individual
discussion or discussions in small groups (2–3 people) of the subsequent topics of the session
(1–2 hours per discussion) and then the key results of the discussions are submitted for plenary
correspondence (2–3 hours per plenary discussion). 3–4 topics are discussed during one
weekend (including the final follow-up of each topic). A session may include watching and
discussing a film selected according to the topic of the session, as well as methodological
consultations and discussions based on the requests of participants.
This is a very intense but feasible and, most importantly, high-performance and efficient form
of a Newtonian seminar provided that the results of such sessions include not only developed
texts or clusters of texts, but also the participants themselves and the workshop as a group of
participants: this type of activity enables to sift and refine the creative heart of a scientific team.
The results of each session in the form of texts are formatted, edited and corrected to finally
become a section of a joint monograph or a collection of articles. In fact, during several months
of the workshop that engaged 7–9 participants there have been published and prepared for
publication 6 collections of articles and 2 monographs: these texts are actively read and
commented within as well as outside the workshop.
Undoubtedly, these are only two types of remote verbal communication, and more can be
developed. One of the ultimate advantages of these types of seminars is the switch from verbal
to written communication. In contrast with the methodological tradition, where oral speech
enforced by volent emphasis and charisma is the main form of communication, written thought- communication is more responsible and promoting cognition and understanding (“a thought
that does not provoke another thought is not a thought” [3]), both of them, however, can be
accompanied by schematization. In this regard, it is essential to point out three substantial
aspects:
1. the grammar of oral speech is very different from written grammar by word order, verb
government, oral speech is characterized by intonation and stress; the grammar itself is
an expression/reflection of logics while oral speech is usually alogical.
2. It is the written speech (speech, not language) that may be difficult and requires effort
from most people, much more effort than spoken blah-blah, written speech is closer to
cogitation than oral speech oriented at chaotic thinking (=fussing of thoughts and
images)
3. “Manuscripts don't burn” (and either are not peer-reviewed or returned): all archives of
the Moscow’s Methodological Club of the 1950–1980s comprised by voice records of
oral presentations had been transcribed into written speech. Those which had not been
transcribed disappeared and got lost irreversibly: seminars by correspondence cannot
be so easily lost.
The practice of text exchange makes texts readable instead of today’s widespread practice of
burying scientific texts in the RSCI and e-library.ru – a common grave for texts, lonely and
unread by anyone.
Besides, this practice can grow/jell into a new educational technology because it actually
generates an inner dialogue in readers’ minds and demands a written answer which requires
more intellectual effort than passive reading or visualization regardless of how illustrative and
expressive it can be. This returns us back to Plato's dialogues, where a thought of one collocutor
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triggers a thought of the other. This educational construct has already been well-mastered
within the Workshop of activity-based organisational technologies, including writing essays,
adding comments to essays, comments to comments, etc.
Unfortunately, both online technologies and Newtonian seminars are mainly oriented towards
communication with its strict logics and conceptual frameworks, but they lack the colours and
experiences of classroom-based education and interaction in general, such means of interaction
as sympathy and empathy, mimics, gestures, intonation, taste and flavour nuances, the vibes of
touch and pre-touch, the unified situational and energy field. This leads to a natural conclusion:
science and education must return to lecture rooms and laboratories, and “re-places” – places
of recreation, relaxation and reflection, such as cafes, pubs, restaurants, clubs, etc., so as not to
lose their essence.
Education, especially humanitarian education, should be delivered in the atmosphere of
interaction, while communication relates more to scientific work.
References
1. Galileo Galilei – The Assayer (1623; in Italian: Il Saggiatore).
2. Galileo Galilei – Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632; in Italian: Dialogo sopra i due
massimi sistemi del mondo).
3. A. Levintov. – Mysli i mysledeistviia [Thoughts and thought-actions]. Ekaterinburg, Izdatel'skie resheniia,
2019, 356 p. ISBN 978-5-0050-6802-6
4. A. Levintov. – Masterskaia organizatsionno-deiatel'nostnykh tekhnologii: opyt formirovaniia v Moskovskom
gorodskom universitete [The workshop of activity-based organisational technologies: the experience of
development at Moscow City University]. Moscow-Berlin, Direct-MEDIA, 2019, 574 p. ISBN 978-5-4499-0172-9
5. Newton and the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. By Domenico Bertoloni Melli. Edited by I. Bernard
Cohen, Harvard University, Massachusetts, George E. Smith, Tufts University, Massachusetts. Publisher: Cambridge
University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521651778.017, pp. 455-464
6. G.P. Shchedrovitsky. Organizatsionno-deiatel'nostnaia igra [Organisational activity-based game]. Optimal''nye
Kommunikatsii (OK). jarki.ru