Digital visual literacy -- creating and interpreting images

Educause conducts hour long webcasts of topics of interest to University IT faculty and staff. Some of them have been relevant to computer literacy. For example, the program this week was Digital Visual Literacy: Interdisciplinary Skills for the 21st-Century Learner.

The webcast presents an NSF-sponsored project that began at the Brown University Computer Science Department, which is known for computer graphics. The project is based on the premise that digital literacy -- the ability to create and critically interpret visual images like graphs, photos and drawings -- is critical in the 21st century.

You might like to incorporate one of their teaching modules as part of a course you teach. The modules are:

• Introduction to Digital Visual Literacy
• Practical Visual Copyright Skills
• Visual Rhetoric for Blogs
• Visual Dialog in ECommerce
• Graphics Literacy
• 3D Graphics
• Visual Display of Information using Word 2003
• Visual Display of Information using Power Point 2003
• Influencing Decisions with Charts using Excel 2003
• Visual Display of Information in Word 2007
• Effective Visual Display of Information using Power Point 2007
• Influencing Decisions with Charts using Excel 2007

All of the teaching material is free, and they encourage us to use it, develop related material, and give them feedback -- to form a community of visual literacy teachers. You can get the modules and learn more here. (Before you can download modules, you must request a password by sending an email to co-principal investigator Oris Friesen, oris@cox.net).

Click here for archives of previous Educause Live webcasts.