THE ORALITY CENTRE IS COMING TO MELBOURNE!

Saturday 11 August 2018

The Orality Centre is pleased to announce our first day of workshops in Melbourne. Due to the high level of interest in our workshops from Melbourne residents we have booked a new venue at Avenue Neighbourhood House @ Eley.

87 Eley Rd, Blackburn South, Melways Ref – 61H5.

12noon – 3pm Memory Palace workshop with Paul Allen $70

The Memory Palace (also known as the method of loci or memory trails) consists of a sequence of locations in which information is stored by linking it to the physical properties of the location. Memory palaces are the single most effective memory system known, used by all indigenous cultures (such as Australian Aboriginal Songlines and Native American pilgrimage trails). They are best known from the orators of the ancient Greeks from Homer to Cicero. All contemporary memory champions use this method.

Using various temporary objects Paul Allen will demonstrate and explain the process of encoding memory into the physical space of a Memory Palace. He will demonstrate the method using the example of the countries of the world in population order. Once this basic method has been learnt participants will be able to create their own Memory Palaces around their homes, place of work or even in the school classroom. Participants need only their enthusiasm to learn and a vivid imagination to create the various associations between the information being memorised and the location within the Memory Palace itself.

12noon – 3pm Memory Boards workshop with Alice Steel $75

Memory Boards are incredibly effective portable devices and found in various forms right across indigenous cultures, from the songboards and birchbark scrolls of Native Americans to the tjuringa of Australian Aboriginal elders. We will model our memory boards on the well-documented West African lukasa of the Luba people. In its simplest form, the lukasa consists of beads and shells attached to a piece of wood, just the right size to hold comfortably – which we will call a TOC-lukasa. A personal TOC-lukasa is a gorgeous object which is hugely practical as well.

Alice Steel will display the many variations of how Memory Boards may be configured, from the traditional TOC lukasa to Alice’s own egg shaped design. She will then guide participants in how to design, construct and encode information of their own choosing in their very own Memory Board. Please bring information for any topic with you. We will also have examples of suitable information on offer.

 

 

For further enquiries, bookings and enrollments please email us at  info@theoralitycentre.org with your name, contact details and the particular class or workshop you are interested in attending.

Alternatively you can call Paul Allen on 0404 127 038 or Alice Steel on 0401 441 292

 

The Orality Centre was formed by a group of passionate educators who see the potential for advances in learning within the research of Orality Centre Founder, Dr Lynne Kelly, into the ancient memory systems from cultures all around the world.

Our aim is to research, develop and experiment with memory systems that bridge the divide between the ancient methods of learning and retaining information and the modern digital age that provides an abundance of information. Information that has been stored externally from the human mind, as a direct result of the development of literacy, remains disarticulated from the potential of being applied in creative and innovative ways. In response The Orality Centre hopes to revive the ancient and profoundly effective memory capacities of the human mind, since only retained information can actually be construed as knowledge.

The Orality Centre intends to work within the education sector, from primary schooling through to tertiary level, researching the most appropriate and effective means of applying the memory technologies of the past to the modern education of our children. We want to enrich learning for students of all abilities, including those with special needs, learning difficulties and as an extension for advanced learners.  The dream is to deepen their level of engagement and profoundly increase their level of information recall within the context of their schooling and beyond into their daily lives.

Adult learners are also a target for The Orality Centre’s research with the provision of group workshops, individual tuition and targeted memory technologies that are most suited to the interests and fields of study of each individual learner.

We are also interested in reviewing research on the response of those with dementia to music and places from the past, and whether there are formal methods we can employ throughout life to reduce the impact of memory issues with ageing.

From professional development in industries that require a vast amount of memorised information to enthusiastic amateurs who wish to learn more about their area of personal interest or to simply enhance their pre-existing knowledge, the value of memory systems is immense ,

Our research will be conducted in collaboration with our participating students and adult learners alongside our ongoing experimentation with the various memory devices from Indigenous cultures. We will also be devising memory devices here at The Orality Centre.

Our goal is to develop memory technologies that utilise the collective intelligence of us all, thereby harnessing an untapped potential for human creativity and innovation.

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