What is visual literacy and is it different from visual thinking? I’ve been pondering that for a while now. I have absolutely no training in art or any form of visual literacy. I assume, I hope with some degree of accuracy, that visual literacy means, in parallel with textual literacy, knowing the history and current usage of images and colours so you can interpret them within a community of knowledgeable users. As I said, I’ve never studied art or visual stuff, but Jay Cross says 80% of learning is informal – and that’s where I’ve learned anything I know, visually.

My informal learning sources have been

• my genetic mix: I love colour but have a kind of dyslexia with maps and other wholistic, non-linear images;
• my ongoing attempts to understand visuals both moving and still;
• my husband, who studied film, including art, at BU, and continues to read and explore museums and other visual worlds;
• colleagues who have formally studied art and/or graphic design; and
• books such as Robin William’s The Non-Designer’s Design Book, which I highly recommend.

So I’m a autodidact in visual content, kind of in the position of “I don’t know art, but I know what I like.”

And what I like is simplicity and contrast. When I look at Jay Cross’s graph on informal learning, above, I can understand the information immediately. When I was early into the web and both Yahoo and the upstart Google were young, I chose which to follow by appearance.

For me, there was no problem choosing – I went to the visual simplicity of Google. I found the Yahoo page overwhelming and confusing. But I don’t think that’s visual literacy; I think it’s just the way my perception works. Other people may well prefer the complexity and detail of Yahoo’s page.

Currently I’m working on preparing a presentation for MERLOT in August so I’ve been looking at what’s online about PLEs, (Personal Learning Environments) – part of my topic. I found this wonderful wiki filled with visualizations of PLEs – http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams My favorite is Dave Tosh’s –

I like it because he uses icons and different shapes to help convey the meaning, before text comes into play. I like the contrasts and repetitions  that help me sort out the information. Whenever a representation simply positions relatively similar shapes filled with text in different parts of the page, my dyslexia kicks in and it’s so much work to decipher it, that I give up unless it’s really, really important to me.

However!

That’s not the whole story (or even very much) of my take on the importance of visual thinking. Even we visual illiterates can use visual thinking, which I take to mean sketching and laying out information visually as a form of drafting, as part of composing. Mostly when I write, I just start writing, letting my words lead me to a structure that I then use to shape the second draft. Even outlines with their phrases and indenting didn’t work for me. I was solidly text-based, figuring out what to say by writing, sometimes in journal-style, without worrying about correctness or structure. Then I would mine this ore for the thoughts I wanted to shape and present to readers.

Over my adulthood, the culture has become much more visual. Over the previous century photography, visual and audio recording, and the increasing use of graphic design have led to our receiving more information visually. Visual composers use sketches and storyboards; they think visually. Even text-based people now add images to their written pieces, use PowerPoint, and sometimes venture into short videos. Plus, with the advent of the possibilities of word-processing, text has also become a visual experience that affects how people read.

When I started preparing the PowerPoint expected for my conference presentation, I found, as I have previously, that I was having trouble writing my way into composing my content for a visual medium. I needed to do something visual to help me compose my presentation. A delightful coincidence occurred. I was inspired by Michele Martin‘s PLE mindmap.

and in my Twitter explorations, I discovered Wisdomap. Michele’s inspiration and the stumbling onto a new web app to play with led me to create my own current PLE mindmap –

And here’s what the whole Wisdomap screen looks like –

I really like the added features – I can attach videos, images, files and sites to my mindmap for a richer collection of information. And, when I had some problems with this beta app, they responded quickly and sorted out the bugs.

So I’m thinking with visual tools; both my Wisdomap page with my PLE mindmap and associated materials, and my PowerPoint presentation allow me to think visually.

However, I believe this doesn’t mean I’m visually literate, just that I can (and need to) use visuals in my composing, in my thinking. Peter Elbow, I think, wrote that the person that benefits most from writing a textbook, is the writer him or herself. Even poorly written textbooks (and there are many) make the author think through the information and put it into context, thus learning it more deeply. Writing is a way of learning. Writing theorists universally encourage the keeping of journals and engaging in free-writing, informal writing, to think with and learn through. I think learning the habit of informal visual thinking is an important addition to free-writing as ways of thinking and learning.

Using visual tools to think with, using them informally, is increasingly a neccessity in this increasingly visual age. You don’t have to be visually skilled and/or literate to think visually informally; you just have to figure out what works for you and find those tools.