Comments on: Visual literacy: Do you have it?

By: Infographics – Visualizing News Stories — Simple Complexity

Infographics – Visualizing News Stories — Simple Complexity — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:58:21 +0000

[...] were two interesting posts about Visual Literacy. Click here and [...]

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Thu, 31 May 2007 03:39:52 +0000

Mark — I bet you’re going to write that post at your own blog (“what skills they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE TO GET A JOB”) … so I can LINK TO IT!

By: Mark E. Johnson

Mark E. Johnson — Thu, 31 May 2007 01:55:57 +0000

I think (and here comes my personal rant with all of education – take it with a grain of salt) that almost every issue we have to wrestle with as teachers comes from the fear of a bad grade. Our entire educational system is now biased towards “standardized tests” – in their pre-collegiate days, all students seem to do is learn how to take tests. Where’s the learning there? Is that a skill they really need?

So, how do we get around that? All of my classes have ridiculous redo policies – any assignment turned in on-time can be redone for a different grade. Redos are due two weeks after the critique goes out. Not happy with the redo? You get another two weeks.

My job is to help them learn the material – if some learn it on the first try, great. Some (especially in a skills-based class) may take a couple of tries. If they get it by the end of the (artificially imposed deadline) semester, then that’s still good, right? Why should they get a lower grade if they learned the material?

And, yes, I do a lot of grading, but not as much as, ahem, I’d like. The good students do the work, and redo it. The slackers (we all have some), accept the C (and occasional D) and just move on. Which hurts them more as everything in my photojournalism classes builds – if you lose one piece, it gets really hard to get the next piece.

I do occasionally wonder if it’s just frustrating for them – they do the work, get a C and I tell them to try again. And again. And again. (The record is seven attempts at one assignment, I think.) In any other class, they’d take the C and grumble about it. But in mine, they sit there staring at it and try to decide if they want to improve or not. The burden to learn is on their shoulders at that time.

The other thing we need to do (especially here) is to let our students know what skills they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE TO GET A JOB. I’m amazed at times at how poorly prepared some of our students are as they don the cap and gown. I don’t know if that’s them or us or a combination.

Probably another topic entirely.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:39:18 +0000

Mark, how much of that do you think is caused by fear of a bad grade? I find that some students won’t do anything unless they are graded for it — but the flip side is, they don’t want to be creative or deviate from the assigned task.

By: Mark E. Johnson

Mark E. Johnson — Wed, 30 May 2007 17:52:32 +0000

I was talking with a friend about an internship opening at a paper he’d just left. (It was a good leave – he liked the paper but it was time for him to move on.)

He had become the lead multimedia guy mostly because his boss would give him a project and tell him to “figure it out.”

In my short time in academia, one of the things I keep running into is a fear of failure. Students do not want to experiment, to try something, because they believe the consequences of getting it wrong are absolute when, in fact, the consequences of not experimenting are absolute failure.

When it comes to “skills” classes (as opposed to .. well … I don’t know what), we need to find ways of encouraging students to play, to experiment. To make themselves uncomfortable and ensure there’s no punishment for trying something new.

Students won’t sketch because they’re taught form an early age that there is only one right answer to every question. We need to teach them to Fail Faster, then let it go and move on.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Mon, 28 May 2007 16:56:12 +0000

So the teaching must include drills and practice — I agree. If you don’t produce visual communication, you can’t learn to communicate visually.

Most people are immersed daily in a lot of visual messages, so they do seem to muddle through — as receivers of these transmissions.

Just because I can read a Spanish newspaper does not mean I can converse fluently in Spanish.

By: Chuck Fadely

Chuck Fadely — Sun, 27 May 2007 20:46:04 +0000

If, in words, you describe troops enforcing Little Rock’s desegregation, the 20-year-old in China will still be mystified.

You would have to write an encyclopedia to describe the entire cultural landscape that led to armed troops surrounding small children.

Language depends on culture and context. You have to learn more than definitions to speak a language.

Even “universal” visual symbols — like the international “no” sign — require learning definitions and grammar rules. You first learn that a circle with a slash means “no”.

Then you learn that the circle/slash over a “P” means no parking; over an arrow means you can’t turn that way.

Then you learn subtleties and context and learn that the circle/slash over the picture of a cow with horns doesn’t mean you can’t bring your cattle here, but means “no bulls..t”, but in a joking way.

This is the same process by which you learn a language.

Our education system doesn’t really emphasize fluency in visual languages. Most Americans are stuck at the pidgin level while creating visuals, even though many can understand the language.

I applaud attempts to teach visual literacy, but the approach needs to be modeled after learning a language, and not like learning math or science.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 27 May 2007 18:46:56 +0000

Chuck, I agree with you in principle, but then I need to look at how the communication to an audience works. If I publish a photo like the one I linked here, with no accompanying text, no one in the audience will know what the story is.

Who are they? What are they doing? Where are they? Why are those soldiers with those schoolchildren? When did this happen? You might know some of the answers because you are an American. But show that image to a 20-year-old in, say, China, and the story will be a complete mystery.

By: Mindy McAdams

Mindy McAdams — Sun, 27 May 2007 18:42:07 +0000

Thanks, Ron. I like those suggestions. I’ve been thinking about picking out a nice sequence and assigning one to all the students — the trick is to make sure I don;t need to spend 10 hours grading their work!

By: Ron Sylvester

Ron Sylvester — Sun, 27 May 2007 10:14:10 +0000

And mark down for typos, like that last post. Serves me right for trying to type with tired fingers.