Visual literacy is the name of my game, after all, I teach High School Visual Arts!

This put extra pressure on me to do my very best work for this course. I figured everyone would judge me as a teacher by the quality of the projects I posted…and quite right too……..

I have learned a lot, most importantly, how the power of visuals can increase understanding across a range of learning styles. Despite the lengthy process of creating my infographic, this format revealed itself to be a wonderful learning tool. I will make more on different subject topics in the hope of increasing student comprehension through greater engagement. In Dr Anne Bamford’s Visual Literacy White Paper  , Lapp et al (1999)  emphasize : “the importance of visual communication to capture attention, reinforce knowledge and increase audience responses.”   If an idea is visually engaging, the rest of the brain will take notice.  I hope to try this theory out on my Intro to Art, Drawing & Painting and Photography classes.

Over the past weeks I’ve been making students aware of the future-proofing qualities of Creative Commons. I can relate to Bamford’s belief that visual literacy involves the interpretation of “the content of visual images…purpose, audience and ownership.”  I see my job as to arm students in the art of self-protection against future lawsuits by copyright owners world-wide. I ask them,”Who knows if you’ll be the next big Art star? Maybe your paintings will sell for fortunes in ten years from now! So if your painting  is based on a copyrighted photo, then the Shepard Fairy lawsuit could happen to you!”  His Obama “Hope” painting case has really struck a chord with my students as it has become the  classic  case of “if only he’d used a Creative Commons photo !”

So when my classes are trawling the web for their own photo references, I’ve given students a clear choice: “search for your sources from photos using the Creative Commons license , or create your own visual resources!” Using my skills as a Photo teacher, I can help students re-create images they find online and step it up a notch and really innovate, instead of just making reproductions of someone else’s vision.

These are serious words that go to the heart of education and its true role in our global economy. Visual literacy depends on cultural influences, as shown by anthropologists  Bendis and Mensch in their 2011 presentation. So cultural awareness will still be a crucial element as we work together across time zones. These cultural differences are dissolving as we all share the same pool of creative endeavor through the Web. Is visual literacy the fastest acquired human cognitive skill ? How far we have come since our cave painting days 10,000 years ago…

As Kevin Kelly points out in “Becoming Screen Literate”( New York Times 2008), there are so many adaptations we have made in our transition from a paper culture to a global cyber-culture. The most often-used ability to quickly scan a page and siphon off the relevant and ignore the obscure, discussed by Aula and Rodden (2009), is one which we have to teach to enable our students absorb screen-based information.

I’ve come to realize that I have been (unknowingly) teaching it for fifteen years…. One of my favorite ever lessons is Timed Figure Drawing. I always marvel at my art students’ rapid acquisition of the skill of super-fast figure drawing. First they have 10 seconds to complete a drawing, then 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes and half an hour.

In the space of an 80 minute lesson, most students start out clumsily finding their connection between eyes, brain and hand; between the model and their surroundings (to use as measurements). They begin nervously scratching at the paper uncertainly, but by the third or fourth drawing, everyone has found a way to make it work for them. Their drawings blossom into a considered, increasingly confident fluency which shows in their style on the page and in their own faces. It’s a lovely adaptation to watch. Quite a complex set of cognitive tasks, as they keep moving the charcoal over the page while their brains ask their eyes “where is the top of the head in relation to the window?” Then they need to transfer that information to their fingertips whist fine-tuning their initial inspection to re-calculate the distance between the eyes or the angle of a leg. All the time trying to make this series of individual puzzles fit together as a whole which meets their own cultural expectations about qualities of beauty! Isn’t that a killer set of employable skills to use in any number of industries which now demand creativity and perception ? Wouldn’t any future-proofing employer want a worker like that?

So visual literacy is a big deal for everyone!

When your colleagues are spread around the planet separated by time zones (as Daniel Pink discusses in A Whole New Mind  2008), the most efficient way to communicate, is though visual representations of ideas to reinforce the spoken or typed words.

Jobs are already being awarded through e-portfolios and Skype. The ability to represent yourself in the most positive light will be a molding force in your future. Visual literacy makes this possible in ways which mere words fail. Our students need to be able to manipulate images AND words to be persuasive in an increasingly crowded world. How do we stand out from the crowd if not by the power of our visual representations?

I have to do this myself now in the search for a job as my last year in India begins. So these CoETaIL courses have been a perfectly timed, cleverly constructed set of real-world learning experiences that will catapult me into my own future. I’m not there yet though, as the learning curve has been steeper than any mountain trail I’ve walked in India!

Progress has increased recently as I’ve started to become more fluent in some of the web 2.0 tools. Combining the power of my chosen tools of Photoshop and PowerPoint seemingly creates magic out of cyber-dust! After so many years of taking so many photographs as ends in themselves, it is a massive energizing boost to create them with so much added purpose.

Creating my Digital Story was a great way to take my collection of photographs of our recent Himalayan High School Mini-course adventure , and re-package the best of them with a few carefully crafted words to communicate the experience more fully than with images alone. It was also surprising simple to put together once I’d chosen an approximate set of images to put in sequence. I really enjoyed the process of choosing the right words for each image.

Saying more with less is a skill which has the potential to catch the eye of my next employer. With hundreds of applicants for each job, they will have very limited time to sift through each CV. So the power of combining images and words has never been more valuable. As true for me as it will be for my students.

I can see how the addition of music would have made it a more complete sensory experience, but ( in my zeal for total originality) I wanted to use music I had created myself on guitar. However, my understanding of GarageBand is too basic to make it work in time. I will endeavor to acquire this skill when time allows in the coming months…

I plan to introduce this as a final project for my Photo students in the coming weeks. The process of creating a sketched/annotated storyboard will be a fairly easy for most students. They can create them on A6 tag board, for durability, before setting out with camera & Storyboard in hand. The sense of purpose created will hopefully drive students to find innovative solutions to the real-world difficulties which may hinder the production of their vision. I can see it will be very popular with my media-savvy students who will probably get a lot of developmental skill-creation out of this type of project.

The working-world applications are clear to see…if a student can transfer their cognitive vision into physical reality, firstly through as series of 2”X4” thumbnail sketches and then into a set of related photographs, before editing and adding carefully crafted text, then couldn’t they also use those skills in so many industrial settings? Are these not the skills used to design any number of new products such as new wind turbines or ships or waste water systems or bicycles or computers? If we are to educate a generation of innovators, then we need to equip them with these sorts of skills.

Thomas Friedman talks about innovation in “Hot, Flat and Crowded” (2008. p165). I was fascinated by his reference to Jeff Wacker, who “likes to say that innovators are those people who know the 99 percent that everybody knows and therefore are able to create the 1 percent that nobody knows.”  We can only know the 99 percent if we are tech savvy and able to access it. These CoETaIl courses have opened my eyes to the vast sea of knowledge out there for us to use as stepping stones to create something new to add to the world.

Of course visual literacy is the essential skill required to sift through the dross to find the nuggets of information. The ability to use our limited research time effectively can reap dividends when we find an image or a sentence or two which spark an idea or even provide the missing link in our own design plans.

The skills involved are those we need to survive in the future economy. A future which recently had me signing my son up for Mandarin classes, rather than French, because of the global economic shift of power from west to east.

This is why I’m always encouraging my own children to be creative instead of only consuming culture through books and TV. Indeed “it is easier to read a book than to write one, easier to listen to a song than to compose one” as Kevin Kelly writes in “Becoming Screen Literate”. So while I know they need to be screen literate, I’m acutely aware that if they don’t learn to produce something soon, they’ll only ever be consumers. How can I expect them to prosper if they’re not contributing? The credit-card debt of UK citizens is a result of this consumer-culture, which is now facing an uncertain future of massive debt and seemingly no way to ever pay it off. When almost everything we buy has been produced in the east, how can we pay in the long term? The burning ambition of the east has started to singe our complacent dominance.

The discipline of creating my Zen and Pecha Kucha presentations was a fine way to learn to identify the key aspects of my messages and to eliminate the padding. For the Zen presentation, I enjoyed the process of editing my previous PPT to give it more impact through elimination of distracting text. I carried this process through into my Pecha Kucha PPT where I looked at an existing set of skills which I teach and found a better way to package them for student comprehension. It was a big challenge to take so much technical information and reduce it to the barest but most essential key words and illustrative images. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to do this and will continue to create similar presentations for other subject areas.

However, my physical presentation of these PPTs has opened my eyes to just how much more practice I need to win over my next interview board.  All of these visual and literary skills may help get me an interview, but it is my presentation skills which will get me my next job. I’m not confident presenting to groups of adults. This command of confident verbal presentation skills is difficult for me when the stakes are high. Oddly, I really enjoy presenting lesson introductions to students, but faced with a critical adult audience, I’m always nervous, which detracts from my focus. So now I have identified this issue, I can start work on strengthening this weakness…