1. Visual Literacy

2. 21st Century Students • Average teen watches 22,000 hours TV by 12th grade • Vocab of 14 year olds dropped from 25,000 in 1950 to 10,000 in 1999 • 1 in 4 2-year olds have a TV in their bedroom • By age 21 kids will have spent 10,000 hours on video games, gotten 200,000 emails and spent 10,000 hours on cell phones. They will have read 5,000 hours.

3. Tipping Point (2009) • 45 million households have a HD TV • 52% own digital cameras • 280+ million camera phones have been sold • 12.3 million households listen to pod casts • Top internet sites involve social networking • Internet access is in 75% of homes

4. Students who are visually literate: • Have knowledge of visuals produced through electronic media • Understand elements of visual design, technique, media • Are aware of the emotional, psychological elements of visuals • Comprehend abstract and symbolic imagery • Are informed viewers, critics and consumers

5. What is Visual Literacy? • Process of sending and receiving messages using images • Ability to construct meaning from visual images • Intermediality—combined literacies needed to read in a multi-media world

6. Visual Literacy involves: • Ability to interpret content of visual images • Examine social impact of those images • Discuss purpose, audience and ownership • Ability to visualize internally • Communicate visually • Read and interpret visual images • Be aware of making judgments of accuracy, validity and worth of images

7. Visual Literacy comes from: • Visual Arts • Art history • Aesthetics • Linguistics • Literacy • Philosophy • Perceptual Physiology • Sociology • Cultural Studies • Media Studies • Instructional Design • Semiotics • Communications Studies • Educational Technology

8. One possible course • Identify learning styles • Comprehend the meaning of visual literacy as information • Create graphic representations of data, information, knowledge and wisdom • Use a digital camera, iMovie or equivalent and multimedia software • Provide classmates with constructive online feedback

9. Issues • What issues are being shown in the image? • How is the way the image is being portrayed different from the real world? • What might this image mean to someone else? • What is the message of the image?

10. Information • Where did the information come from? • What was included? What left out? • What proportion could be inaccurate? • What information is factual vs. manipulated? • What is the relationship between the image and text? • What impact does size have?

11. Who • What people are depicted? • Whose culture is represented? • Who created the image? For what purpose? • Who is the intended audience? • Whose point of view does the image take?

12. Persuasion • Why was this media chosen? • Why was a particular image chosen? • Why is the image arranged this way? • Is the information factual? • What devices have been used to get the message across? • How has the message been affected by what was left out?

13. Assumptions • What attitudes are assumed? • Whose voice is heard? • Whose voice is not heard? • What experiences or points of view are assumed?

14. Conclusion • Visual literacy is already prevalent in our culture. • Visual literacy is an essential rhetorical tool. • Multi-media, multi-modal compositions are supplanting traditional modes of writing such as essays. • Visual literacy is the way of the future.

15. Additional resources • International Visual Literacy Association: http://www.ivla.org/ • University of North Carolina K-12 Visual Literacy: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/675 • Picture This: Visual Literacy Activities, Oakland Museum of California: http://museumca.org/picturethis/visual.html • Journal of Visual Literacy: http://www.ohio.edu/visualliteracy/ • Visual Literacy and the Classroom: http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/literacy/riesland.htm