Abstracting

Why is the Ocean Salty?

I was first introduced to the powers of abstracting in learning as an exchange student in high school. I was living in Australia and while I perfectly understood everything the teachers were talking about my “sister” – another exchange student from Brazil who was placed with me – did not. She knew English quite well but a lot of more complex terms and ideas were lost on her. I became very good at explaining things in different terms, from different angles. I didn’t realize it then but years later when I became a teacher the strength of being able to take a topic and come at it from a different angle is very important. To me abstracting in the classroom is paramount to student understanding.

My main topic for this class continues to be Oceanography. For this project I chose the question of ‘Why is the Ocean Salty?’ I picked this topic because it is in fact a very simple answer, but one that many people don’t know.

For my first abstraction I wanted to make a visual image. I have seen thousands of pictures of the water cycle used to describe ocean salinity – many just have more arrows drawn or little salt shaker cartoons tumbling along the picture. I did not want to use words. I find many scientific images become so over burdened with words that students lose sight of the image. So here is the image I created:

I liked the concept of the funnel. Instead of keeping land as it is normally seen (as all the water cycle images do) I propped it up so the idea of runoff is clearer. All the people I have shown this to agree that it depicts rainwater washing something down into the ocean and then the water going back up again. Which is exactly what I wanted to show.

            For my second abstraction I knew right off the bat I wanted to create a Wordle. For this particular one I used part of a US Geological Survey Publication entitled “Why is the Ocean Salty” by Herbert Swenson.  I went through many different Wordles from different passages of this article and finally settled on the introduction. After pasting it into the Wordle application I played with the layout and colors and came up with this:

I knew I wanted to use a Wordle because of the basic concept of visual words. Since my first abstract was a pure image I wanted to go the opposite this time and use all words. But the beauty of this program is that the words still create something cohesive.

            The weaknesses of my abstractions lie in their reliance on an explanation. Neither would stand-alone as the sole answer to Why the Ocean is Salty. They both require some spoken or written explanation.

            I think the strength in both of these abstractions is the visual. Explaining why the ocean is salty is a very basic one-sentence description. Thus it is usually left to just a few slides in a PowerPoint presentation. Being able to put it into different contexts allows a greater understanding especially with visual learners.