An example of a negative analogy (using a familiar context to highlight a difference with the ideas being presented):
"…to consider why particular learners do not come to understand teaching, or at least, do not understand it as intended, so the focus is on the system of a teacher and a learner…
The obvious analogy here might appear to be communication between computers, but that is something that depends on protocols that ensure information communicated is decoded at the receiving end as the inverse, as a mirror image so to speak, of how it has been coded at the sending end. (Computers and associated technology are manufactured, so it is possible to produce clones of the hardware that run on the same operating systems (e.g., MacOS or Windows) which allows identical software to be uploaded on several machines. Human cognitive systems develop organically – different people have different genes, and each person undergoes an idiosyncratic set of learning experiences.)
Human communication is quite different because what is to be communicated is not just information, but understanding, and this requires the teacher to 'code' her thoughts into a form that can be 'decoded' by the learner in a way that leads to them constructing (ideally) the same understanding. Whereas the decoding of information requires an inverse to how it was coded, the interpretation of someone else's speech cannot simply be a reversal of how their cognitive system encoded their thoughts as speech or text."
Read examples of scientific analogies
Many examples of science analogies are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.
The reference to "as a mirror image so to speak" can be considered as a simile.
Read about examples of science similes
Many examples of science similes are listed in 'Creative Comparisons: Making Science Familiar through Language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.
Referring to computers as 'clones' is a metaphor using a concept originally referring to organisms with identical genomes.
Read about metaphor in science
Read about examples of science metaphors
Many examples of science metaphors are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.
