Among the most difficult aspects of building visual literacy is creating awareness of manipulation, a task made continuously harder by the prevalence of 'Photoshopped' or digitally altered photos through fake news or our everyday usage of photo editing apps. So how are educators to build awareness of visual literacy when manipulation has become…

The purpose of this position paper in to provide guidance on the creation and utilization of infographics for learning and instruction. The paper includes practical insights and provides a framework for the creation of infographics. The framework can be used by educators to create their own infographics for instructional and visual literacy…

Visualization of chemical concepts can be challenging for many students. This is arguably a critical skill for beginning students of biochemistry to develop, since new information is often presented visually in the form of textbook figures. It is recommended that visual literacy be explicitly taught in the classroom rather than assuming that…

Apps, specialized programs used on mobile computers, can be used in innovative ways to enhance science and literacy learning. With the skilled guidance of their teachers, students can exploit app affordances for learning and acquire disciplinary literacies unique to science. This article showcases apps that help students to access information,…

Technical communicators are expected to work extensively with visual texts in workplaces. Fortunately, most academic curricula include courses in which the skills necessary for such tasks are introduced and sometimes developed in depth. We identify a tension between a focus on technological skill vs. a focus on principles and theory, arguing that…

Traditionally, people have used perspectives of space and time to define a sense of place and personal identity. Western cultures interpret place and time as static entities. In interactive multimedia computing, visual literacy defines new dimensions in communication that are reshaping traditional Western concepts of place and time. Experience…

In this article, Literacy 2.0 is defined in terms of Web 2.0 influences. Literacy 2.0 encompasses several major characteristics that distinguish it from traditional literacy practices (Literacy 1.0). For educational technology professionals, Literacy 2.0 skills become a critical means for developing lifelong learning.

This article features the Agam program, developed by Yaacov Agam and education researchers, who worked with him to further develop and test the program that teaches visual literacy. Visual literacy is the study of shapes and how they combine to make everything from alphabetic letters to great art. Although the Agam program is long and involved,…

The introduction of techniques for digitizing photographic images, as well as the subsequent development of powerful image-editing software, has both broadened the possibilities of altering photographs and brought the means for doing so within the reach of many. This article is an informal review of the ways image-editing software can be used to…

The visual image is so information-rich that describing its content fully can be very problematic. Trying to codify or analyze the content in any systematic way often proves even more difficult. Nevertheless, reducing certain aspects of visual data to a set of numbers can be useful because it exposes characteristics of the message that might be…

Reviews alternative literacy activities that have a pictorial basis for learning and that may be suitable for use with children with disabilities or learning problems. Notes that alternative literacy activities can be adapted to complement the speech and language programs developed to assist learners with disabilities. (MDM)

Visual reasoning is an essential skill for engineers. This article describes an interactive multimedia application (Visual Reasoning Tutor) that provides a foundation in visual reasoning by exploiting the missing view problem. Presents an overview of system components, a complete sample exercise, and test results for several prototypes used in…

In the current milieu of ISO 9000 certification, just-in-time engineering (JIT), demand flow technology (DFT), and total quality management (TQM), industry is attempting to implement available technology for the creation, control, and delivery of documentation. In most cases, their efforts are in need of outside resources to analyze, develop,…

A major influence this generation of high school digital natives has had on the curriculum is their natural focus on visuals to convey information. They are driving the move toward visual information. In this article, one high school expands the learning environment from handhelds to videoconferencing. Sacred Heart has found that mixing the…

This paper presents elements of the computer graphics environment including information on: Lotus 1-2-3; Apple Macintosh; Desktop Publishing; Object-Oriented Programming; and Microsoft's Windows 3. A brief scenario illustrates the use of the minimization principle in presenting a new product to a group of international financiers. A taxonomy of…