Learning styles....fact or fiction?

In class we watched a video about learning styles. The video was asking if it is possible that learning styles don’t really exist. Do learners really have preprogrammed learning styles such as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic? Do people really learn better if they are presented with information in one way rather than another? These are the questions posed by the cognitive psychologist who produced the video.
He said that different information is stored differently. Such as the shape of a certain object—that some information must be stored visually. A person who has a good auditory memory still needs to be able to see the shape of that object to be able to remember it; you would not try to describe the shape of the object with just words. The psychologist’s most important statement was that learning is meaning based. In other words for a task like learning vocabulary words, the learning does not take place through a visual picture. Research was shown that indicated that there was not a difference between the learning of a person labeled as an auditory learner and a person labeled as a visual learner depending on how the information was presented to them. I am not sure that I understand or agree with everything that was suggested in the video though a number of the ideas made sense. This is a good topic for further research.
His final comment—good teaching is good teaching. I definitely agree with that statement; good teaching involves presenting information in different ways, regardless of learning styles.