This says it all!
via http://everd.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/learning-with-technology/
Category: web2.0
Visual Literacy and Visual Thinking
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.
Quality and Authority
Tony Karrer, in his blog eLearning Technology, explores a question that is often raised about the quality of information added on social media web sites. After watching the Wikipedia “debate” and hearing groups of academics, mostly communications teachers, boast about forbidding its use, I have come to believe that they aren’t talking about quality but about authority.
It takes time and effort to learn about how the social media work and how they can add to the impact and efficiency of knowledge workers. But to simply partake in the chorus of rejection without seriously exploring the possibilities is, IMHO, irresponsible. In my own explorations of the web and how it can be used to help learning, I have noticed two academic reactions. One is the quality card being played, without examination or research, but with confidence. The other is a collection of the most amazing intellectual explorations of this new media environment. I cite the work of Professor Michael Wesch:
This brief video should be studied by all knowledge workers, especially academics who study and teach communication skills. This video, to my mind, displays the excellent intellectual quality of Wesch’s work.
Wesch is an academic, and his work on YouTube can be labelled as good quality because he’s an authenticated authority. The quality of his teaching can be seen in his studying the context of his students, (because it’s a different era from even 10 years ago):
One final citation of Wesch and an anecdote. I stumbled across an hour long video of Wesch presenting at the University of Manitoba. The video is worth several hours of study in what it reveals about teaching, the social media, and students’ learning. – http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html
After I watched this video, I went to Twitter (http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter) and asked if anyone knew which kind of wiki he was using with his class, as I was intrigued by one aspect of it. The same day Michael Wesch himself answer my question. Now that’s good quality communicating! And there are others, academics and non-academics, who are providing work/information of excellent quality using the social media. They are sharing, but you have to find their work, and be capable of recognizing its quality for yourself.
The people who question the quality of work avalable on the social media are actually talking about whether the information is accurate and up-to-date. What they are revealing about themselves is that they are neither accurate nor up-to-date. What we should be teaching and practising in this new communications era is critical thinking, so we as idividuals can distinguish quality without being confused by authorities, who might not be presenting good quality information.
We May be on the Cutting Edge/Signs of Hope
http://www.freefoto.com/preview/15-27-2?ffid=15-27-2
- I have a friend who is updating a well-known business writing textbook. She wants to add an assignment where students have to using podcasting or videocasting, and wants my help in figuring out how to set it up. I see an inroad into college and university communications courses – provided, of course, that the teachers use the assignment.
- The board of a volunteer organization I work with has set up a wiki and begun using it to plan, record and communicate.
- A provincial math education organization is using a wiki to plan. (Ontario is a very, very, very big province and CommonCraft has described the problems with planning by email – http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english).
I see these as signs that people are becoming more conscious of web 2.0 possibilities. It may not have gone viral – yet – but it may be starting to. Work Literacy has been developing frustratingly slowly but maybe, just maybe, the tipping point is approaching.
Old Skills and New Know-How
After reading Michele Martin’s post, Knowledge Workers as Craft Workers, I began to think of other crafts and skills that have been changed by technology.
My grandmother grew her own vegetables, collected eggs from her chickens, and knew how to produce and preserve much of the food she prepared for her family. She baked on a wood stove, knowing what kind of wood to use for what kind of baking, and when to start it burning so the right level of heat was available at the right time to get hot food on the table. My Mom grew some of her vegetables, collected recipes, canned some fruits, and cooked on an electric stove with an oven where she could set the temperature. I use a microwave, prepared food, and eat out a lot;>
Office work, knowledge work, has been going through the same kind of transitions as new technology has created conveniences, and allowed “outdated” skills to be dropped. Imagine someone used to cooking on a wood stove trying to find their way around a microwave, a gas stove, and a modern grocery store. The skills gap would be debilitating, even though the modern technology makes everything “easier”. Without the pressure of needing to eat regularly in this new environment, going back to, or sticking with, the old ways would be very attractive.
How would my grandmother have learned to use the new food-preparing skills? She would have needed to learn them the same way she learned the old skills, by, in the words of Robert Frost speaking of getting an education, “hanging around until she caught on”. She would have needed to do the work with an expert to guide her, a mentor.
The same style of learning is needed for knowledge workers, but the digital natives don’t know the stages of preparation that the older workers learned by seeing each step of the production and talking to all the different craft workers who helped supply each step of the process, as described by Jim McGee.
I started consulting before the advent of the PC. When you had a final presentation to prepare for the client, you started with a pad of paper and a pencil and roughed out a set of slides. You could see that it was a draft and the erasures and cross outs and arrows made that even more obvious. This might be two weeks before the final deadline. Then, you took it to Evelyn in the graphics department down on the eighth floor. After she yelled at you for how little lead time you had given her, she handed your incomprehensible draft to one of the commercial artists in her group. They spent several days hand-lettering your draft and building the graphs and charts. They sent you back a copy of their work.
Then you started another iterative process of correcting and amending this product. Copies got circulated and marked up by the manager and the partner on the project. At the end, the client got to see it and you hoped you’d gotten it right.
All along the way in this old style process, the work was visible. That meant that the more junior members of the team could learn how the process unfolded and how the final product grew over time. You, as a consultant, could see how the different editors and commentators reacted to different parts of the product.
The digital native, who can use the new tools, have experienced the creation of a project differently.
While today’s tools have made the journey from germ of an idea to finished product so much easier, they have also made it harder by making it less visible. It’s my sense that most of us don’t even see what we’ve inadvertently given up. It takes a conscious act of will to think about how to use today’s tools in ways can give us both the productivity of the new and the process value hidden in the old accidental visibility.
Let me give you a personal example. In the 1980s I, through stubborn determination and being positioned in (though I didn’t know the term then) a community of practice, learned how to use word-processing but I used it as though it were a type-writer. I had no idea about the impact of design on readers; I wasn’t even aware of the layout skills a good typist knew tacitly, let alone what graphic designers knew. Luckily a student alerted me to those skills by mentioning Robin Williams’ The Non-Designers’ Design Book, which allowed me to know what I didn’t know, and learn some of it.
When I watch people learn how to use word-processing, what I see them doing is learning how to push the buttons, but I don’t see them learning about the basics of designing for readers. I also see web masters in love with Flash and apparently unaware of Jakob Nielsen‘s reader-friendly information on scannable text. People are often learning only the technological buttons, and not the art that makes the information effective and powerful.
So knowledge workers have two problems in learning to use the new technology. One problem is learning the technology itself. The other is the invisible problem; it’s learning how to go through the stages and what other craftspeople, now removed from the process, knew.
So those who have the old skills need to work with those with the new know-how, and those with the new know-how need to listen to and learn from the pre-digital workers. I didn’t learn how to use a wood stove from my grandmother, but I did learn what a good meal was, even if part of it was heated in the microwave;>
A MakeBeliefs Comix
I like to play with new and easy tools – so here’s my comment on the Work Literacy dilemma, using MakeBeliefsComix.com, a screenshot, and Skitch.com
Who’s the Audience and Where are they?
In response to Michele Martin’s post, Developing Work Literacies: Who’s the Target Audience?
I keep thinking about how information spreads. I’ve watched it spread online and know where to watch to keep up. I found the phrase that was going round the web a few months ago interesting: “News finds me!” and it’s true that web-savvy people set up networks that push the info they’re interested in at them. But what about offline? How does information spread there?
I thought about this yesterday as I picked up some cookies in an upscale market. There was a cooking show on the screen you could watch while waiting in the cashier lineup. Free ideas for meals! I thought about how people get inspired to learn while I was in an Apple Store attending a free workshop. The session had too much information to learn effectively but you could see the possibilities of Keynote, especially if you were familiar with PowerPoint (I am) and if you’d already played with Keynote (I have).
(An aside: if anyone knows how to change the font of a theme for the whole show rather than one slide at a time, I’d appreciate the information. Same thing with setting transitions for the whole show rather than one at a time. Other than those, I love Keynote.)
I thought about how people pick up ideas to try out while listening to friends and my husband discuss cooking shows. Then I thought about the strategy of a used car saleman (I think they know audience behavior;->) I used to teach with. When our office layout was changed, he always ended up next to the coffee. He said that it was the communication hub. They don’t have department coffee spots any more where I used to work; they have a Tim Hortons and a Second Cup. Maybe a Starbucks too by now; I haven’t been on that campus for a couple of years. The principle continues; people now meet in the coffee line-ups and chat. And there are notices, ads, and even screens with slideshows repeating themselves positioned around the lineups.
Word-of-mouth is powerful and can be stimulated by well-placed, well-designed media. If flyers and ads on the benefits of web and computer applications were as omnipresent as cooking shows and essay mills, if people were alerted in line-ups to one simple, short series of actions that could make their work easier or more interesting, wouldn’t that speed up the adoption of Work Litracy behaviors? If the posters or shows were rotated a couple of times a week, so there was both novelty and repetition, …
If there can be coffee franchises, why not Work Literacy franchises? Or have I gone too far into fantasy land again?
Email Survival and Work Literacy
Does a Knowledge Work Skills Gap Exist?
Work Literacy asks the question; “Does a knowledge work skills gap exist?“ I answer: “You bet!”
Example Problem
For example, let’s talk about email. I find almost everybody knows about the existence of email, and most can use at least a simple version. However, for many people, anything beyond composing a simple message, opening a message, replying or forwarding, and possibly adding attachments, is an unmapped wilderness.
Many professionals feel swamped and victimized by their email load and haven’t developed effective strategies to deal with it. Many don’t know where to find out how to get more control over their inboxes, and where to get help. Their IT support, if it exists, doesn’t really know, or has a more technical approach than they can understand. And besides, everyone needs to find a strategy that works for them in their own particular situation.
I haven’t seen much information about how to deal effectively with business email publicly available. (By “publicly” I mean something people who aren’t sophisticated in their online exploring can easily find.) The blogosphere has rumbled with information about GTD – Getting Things Done – and there’s even a way to add it to gmail, but it’s a system that’s really more aimed at geeks, according to the 43 folders blog
And Getting Things Done may be good for many geeks, but I have developed my own approach.
Example Solution
The solution I’ve found to my email dilemma has been to forward all my email addresses to gmail, where I can add one or more labels, some nicely coloured, to the emails I want/need to keep and then archive them till needed, secure in the knowledge that –
- I have lots and lots of storage space, and don’t need to worry about filling up my quota; and
- When I have to switch computers, whether it’s short term (I’m at my friend’s and want to check my email) or long term (I just bought a lovely new machine!) I can still access all my email on my gmail account.
In my opinion, the easiest strategy to take control of email is to use gmail. However, I have to admit that it’s my geek tendencies that have allowed me to find help by using Google to search and find –
- Online help – http://email.about.com/od/gmailtips/Gmail_Tips_Tricks_and_Secrets.htm and/or https://gmail.google.com/mail/help/about.html
- And a more conventional help source – a book with pictures! http://www.amazon.com/Google-Gmail-Visual-QuickStart-Guide/dp/0321330161
How many people who feel lost in the online world would think to search for a solution to their email problems there?
Using gmail is a possible solution but the real problem is, how to help knowledge workers find out what they could be doing to make their lives easier. Many say they just don’t have time to learn new stuff or even look for help.
Knowledge Skills Work Gap Problem
So we have circled back to the beginning. Strategies and solutions are available, but how do we get the information out to the people who don’t know what they don’t know?
WebTools for Learners, this blog, is my attempt to help share the knowledge, but sometimes I think I’m preaching to the choir. Those who already know, approve of what I say, but do any of the real learners actually find this blog and benefit from it? I keep trying and keep looking for ideas and suggestions about how to connect with those who need to know.
Any suggestions?
Playing with Wordle and del.icio.us Tags
I couldn’t resist playing with this toy, Wordle, that I found through Chris Sessums – Here is a Wordle tag cloud of my del.icio.us account.
Autodidacts and Web 2.0: Are Universities Still Needed, Part 2
As I thought again about being an autodidact and what universities could do for learners, I realized that universities have been part of my Personal Learning Environment. (If you are an autodidact, you have to have your own PLE. For years mine only included books and other people. Now it includes bloggers, social bookmarking, the way I’ve organized my computer, other people in person, and books, probably in something like that order;->)
That wasn’t true for my undergraduate degree, or only partially so. I took the courses I had to and the ones I believed I could pass. But while I can recall nothing from my Astronomy for Humanities Students except the professor’s disdain for Astrology, I did learn which is which. Of some importance I guess;->
What I learned in the courses I thought I could pass was that some courses (in my stronger areas} that I took because they gave me a nice schedule, could open up into new insights, understandings and interests. I came to appreciate that courses could have hidden treasures for me, that some academics had an approach and a breadth of knowledge that I could learn from, that they weren’t just showing off their knowledge so they could win some obscure “I know more than you – ha, ha” game. I learned that, sometimes, struggling through ideas and information allowed me to construct a complex web of understanding that was deeply meaningful to me in my life. It was a thrilling discovery. That and a mate who habitually reads, questions and wants to know more, have made me a learning addict (and an autodidact).
I have spent my life trying to figure things out. Both my graduate degrees unlocked new understandings for me, and both were part of my PLE. I signed up for each because I had a question that the books and the people around me couldn’t answer. Both times, some of my courses were blind alleys to endure, and many were quests that left me with new treasures. And both times, I chose what I wanted to learn about and continued my learning outside my studies as well as inside.
So my attitude towards universities and learning is that of a frustrated idealist. I know I learned deeply and richly because universities have been part of my life, but why are the pockets of innovative and exciting learning/teaching about communications so few and/or so hard to find in this era of explosive change in communication tools and concepts?
Learning Living 