Contents
Learning

Axia's Patent Pending Unique Way to Learn

Explore Mode

Challenge Mode

Incremental Learning

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Explore Mode

In Explore Mode, Axia gives you the ability to call up two items and view them side-by-side. The human mind has a strong tendency to selectively pick out similarities and differences when given the opportunity to compare things that are alike. This actively engages you in the learning process, and goes far beyond being told what things to look for: instead, you are finding them yourself. With a click of a button, you can compare two items along different characteristics, bringing the multi-dimensional nature of real knowledge to life in an easy and effortless way.


Challenge Mode

To us, a quiz is not a way to measure how much you know. It is instead part of a wonderful new way of learning, that of sorting out those things that are most similar in your current state of knowledge. For those who like names and handles, we call it Constructive Discrimination. Given an item to identify, it is highly unlikely that all but the most experienced will know what it is at any given time. On the other hand, most people have some idea of what it might be and have in their mind a set of possible items to choose from.

Your guess is your selection from that set of items closest to the target item to be identified. If you are right, great. If not, then Axia shows you what you thought it was. This brings to the comparison screen the item in your mind which is most similar, most easily confused, and needs most to be distinguished  from the target. Side-by-side comparison allows you to construct the similarity and difference pieces of knowledge which constitute expertise.

Furthermore, if you really knew the guess perfectly, you would not identified it as the target item. So you are learning about the guess item at the same time. Axia does not just blab the right answer. Instead it lets you try again, so that you continue to explore the set of items that are similar in your mind to the target item. Every guess gives you new knowledge or the positive kick of being right. Of course, you can get the answer at any time you wish.

The presentation of knowledge about items using multiple Aspects (characteristics) allows you to use Challenge Mode to learn to identify items either through single characteristics (such as bird song) or through the use of multiple characteristics (such as photos, videos, range maps, etc.).

Axia offers you the ability to learn through compressing what would otherwise be years of experience in identification and comparison into minutes of engaging and absorbing interaction. Axia goes far beyond the learning style prevalent today: being told by someone or something about the characteristics of an item and trying to remember them. Axia seduces you to learn through the experience of perception, identification, similarity comparison and constructive discrimination - the way it happens in real life. Now thats virtual reality.


Incremental Learning

Its a pretty formidable task to learn to sort out 40 or 50 different and new items at the same time. Thats why we created Incremental Learning. You can ask for a smaller learning set of items , say three things, which are randomly chosen. Now most people can pretty quickly tell three things apart (if thats too much, try two things as the learning set). After you get the identification of one of them right a number of times in a row (which you can set), that item is thrown out and a new one brought in. You are learning new things in the context of things familiar, as you progress in incremental learning.

Increase the size of the learning set after you have gone through the entire collection of items. You will be amazed first at how pleased you are to identify things correctly, how quickly you learn to discriminate important features in a small learning set, and how rapidly you progress to learning the entire set. Have fun and tell us if it works for you.