Visual Display of Information and Visual Explanation: Visuals as Instruments that Help People to Reason about Information

During the class on “Visual Display of Information and Visual Explanation” I observed that students were generally enthusiastic about this topic. They approached the task on selection of the best display of information about Giant Squid and uncovered important issues regarding effective presentation. Important point that emerged from this engagement was that if a visual representation is given to students for learning than there is a need for a teacher to prepare some additional questions or task that would direct them to seek information presented in appropriate ways (to support development of visual literacy). In this context, these visuals are resources which alone might not be sufficient for learning to take place. Teachers must create additional tasks that would place students to use visuals as instruments that mediate this task completion. This is an important point and I will work more in this in a lesson that will deal with learning objects as interactive visual representations designed specifically for educational purposes.

I noted that all students have created their own blogs and very interesting visual introductions about themselves. I have one point to make here. Design of visual information is much easier when we understand information that we want to communicate. However, design of visual material does not usually work this way. Often, visual designers are given unfamiliar information to work with and present it into visual formats. So what can they do? First, and perhaps most challenging thing is to learn about that information and then decide how can it be presented in most effective ways through visuals. I assigned the student such a task and I am looking forward to see the outcomes of it by next class.

In relation to blogs, my concern is if students would sustain their genuine interest to continue blogging and see it as a useful tool to reflect on their learning and present artifacts of their progress. When I say genuine, I mean, the blog should be seen more than just requirement of the assessment or even burden, but as something useful for learning. At the same time I hope that my students will see and learn about potential of blogging to support learning and serve as a digital portfolio. Once they return to their own school classrooms, I hope that they might try something similar with their own students.

Most concerning issue that emerge form this class is in relation to Macromedia Flash. Although I do not expect student to develop strong technical skills (but to demonstrate innovative spirit and creativity in design of visual representations), I would like to offer them some opportunity to learn certain useful things of Macromedia Flash. I created self-paced material for them to use in their own time and I will also demonstrate some key things in the class, however the problem is with the version of software that we use. In our class we have Flash MX while current version available for download from Macromedia site is version 8. Although the working principles are same, these two versions differ to certain extent in interface and functionalities. Students should try to work with new version, however, thanks to my technical support MX trail version is located and made available to students to download and install on their own computers.