The paper considers the particular value of focusing on the look as a medium when studying visual cultures. This focus is helpful for coming to terms with distinct understandings of the visual. To address the look as a medium, four analytical dimensions are introduced for distinguishing among separate but closely interrelated visual phenomena: the…

Due to the large number of students, instructors teaching high enrollment courses often rely on traditional assignments such as scantron exams and research papers. While these types of assignments are functional and satisfy a purpose, they are typically not meaningful or pleasurable for students. In an introductory information technology course,…

As new media emerge in the common culture, the authors recommend that art educators adopt those media to facilitate deep understanding of visual culture and literacy. They report here on applications of an online image gallery that helps users develop ways to interpret what they see and compose. Over the past few years the authors have…

Communication has always been at least partly a visual experience--insofar as the speaker's appearance on a stage or the text's appearance on the page. Certainly, however, the experience is becoming more and more visual. Thus, equipping students with the tools necessary to analyze and evaluate the visual rhetoric that surrounds everyone is a task…

Contemporary culture has become increasingly dependent on the visual, especially for its capacity to communicate instantly and universally. Advances in technology fueled this shift. Students must learn to cope with and intelligently contribute to a culture rife with easy access to the visually rich Web, photo dependant social networks, video…

Deconstruction is a critical literary theory which focuses on the unintentional meanings of a text and aims to achieve an unprejudiced, value-free vision of the social and political power structures in society that combine to produce the text. The development of such critical skills in advertising students will deepen their ability to judge the…