Improving understanding with images
Posted by tektrekker on 11 May, 2007
If you’ve ever tried to explain complex information with words, you know how frustrating and time consuming that can be – for you and for many of your learners – and images can often be the way to go. However, visual literacy is a skill that many of us have never fully developed…oh, we “get” info in images pretty well, but that’s entirely different than trying to express ideas through images. People who can do that are gonna rule our hyper-rich-media world. So, if you wanna rule the world, then a good place to start to build those visual literacy skills is the uber fantabuloso Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. This table gives you examples for how to express metaphors, strategies, concepts… you name it, there’s an example for it. Check it out. It has to be seen to be understood. Sorry… I couldn’t resist.
andflywrite said
Bethany,
Yes, uber fantabuloso about sums it up. I get that you like charts, and this is so charts on ‘roids.
My only problem, and this is apparently a problem with visuals that have text in them…(as I have tried to wrangle a huge diagram like PKE onto a printed page and still be able to read the text…) ….images need to be pretty big on a screen to have text that is readable in size…and in this case I can’t read a great deal of the text in the images…and even the chart itself has tiny tiny text.
Kind of ironic, in this case, because we still often depend on at least some text to explain what we are looking at.
But I’m sure PTVM will still help me rule the world, even if I go blind trying.
Enjoying this blog a lot! Including vodpod and blogroll with the useful trailfires.
John
Bethany said
Thanks, John.
Yes, I do tend to like charts as they help me organize my thoughts – then, once my thoughts start taking shape, I can free myself up to be more creative in my understanding of the topic. I like to start with structure then break it down. Others like to start with the broken down bits and create structure. Was just speaking about this with Liz, as a matter of fact. Anyway, I am finding that trying to address the needs of both types of individuals within a single assignment is quite challenging.