Abstract:

Many types of mnemonic devices historically have helped students, teachers, and all manner of professionals recall, retrieve, and work with information (such as the bones in the hand, or — more classically — the key points of a speech). Recalling information, however, is only the first part of the usefulness of such schemes. The other part, as classroom applications bear out, involves the generation of new ideas. Proposed here is an interdisciplinary model of mnemonics that is generative and constructivist, enabling the reformulation of accumulated data in innovative ways and the conceptualization of novel approaches to the ideas behind the data.