After marveling at the simplicity and effectiveness of the website pictured above, I wondered how it had such an impact. In addition to being a well categorized resource - not dissimilar to my own Firefox bookmarks - I found the use of icons instead of text very appealing. I find this form of information management and organization to be more naturally navigable. That's the reason I created the Webucation site. This got me pondering a little, and I came up with this question.
Have we as educators taken time to consider the need to embed visual literacy into our curricula?
So, I headed off to Wikipedia, where many of my more successful searches start, to see if I could find some quotable quotes from sources cited on the subject of "visual literacy".
On arrival, the entry seemed to lack objectivity with reference to how visual literacy is being addressed in education. The contention that "...many educators in the twenty-first century promote the learning of visual literacies as indispensable to life in the information age," seemed a little obscure - verification and reworking was required.
I remembered that someone in my Twitter network, or maybe Diigo, had recently recommended a book on visual literacy. After a brief visit to Google Book Search I found Engaging the Eye Generation: Visual Literacy Strategies for the K-5 Classroom by Johanna Riddle.
The beauty of Google Book Search is that you get to "preview" the first and last 20-30 pages of a book. With the use of Command-F, I was able to find the reference we needed on page 3.
With reference in hand, I signed into my Wikipedia account and began to rework the entry until satisfied. The entry now reads:
Since technological advances continue to develop at an unprecedented rate, educators are increasingly promoting the learning of visual literacies as indispensable to life in the information age. Similar to linguistic literacy (meaning making derived from written or oral human language) commonly taught in schools, most educators would agree that literacy in the 21st Century has a wider scope.”[3] Educators are recognizing the importance of helping students develop visual literacies in order to survive and communicate in a highly complex world.
And at the bottom of the page... "3. ^ Riddle, J. (2009). Engaging the Eye Generation: Visual Literacy Strategies for the K-5 Classroom. Stenhouse Publishers page 3."
I'm still not sure about the Information Age reference as we have transcended it and are now in the Conceptual Age, according to Dan Pink in his must-read book - A Whole New Mind. However, there does seem to be an unwritten law in Wikipedia, or any wiki for that matter, not to overdo a rewrite. You need to show a little respect for previous contributor efforts, unless of course the information is way off base.
Back to the make over, I think it makes for a more credible read, and I fully expect someone will come along and give it a needed clean up. If you look up "visual literacy" in Wikipedia, it may have been changed already.
If you happened to read my last post on Wikipedia for Schools, you may realize I am an advocate of publicly editable and peer reviewed knowledge. We have much to gain from the decentralization of knowledge.
In the past the masses had little choice in which individuals and organizations were elevated to the status of authority and therefore "allowed" to construct knowledge. This has led to the reason why revisionists are busy re-filtering the murky waters of history - surviving histories were and are often written by the victorious (read "rich, western capitalists").
In an age where we are becoming increasingly aware of how information can be contaminated by biased interests, Wikipedia, with its thousands upon thousands of information watchdogs, is a poster child for the democratizing power of the internet.
Now that you have seen how straightforward this is, why not contribute to the biggest volume of public knowlege out there? Give Wikipedia editing a go. After all, we are all passionate about something.
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