Visual Literacy Trainings
Many students tend to use pictures in a symbolic way or only partially illustrate the key concepts. There are times and places for using symbolic pictures or partial depictions. The problem is that even when they actually need to use pictures to supplement messages in a direct and comprehensive manner, they cannot do it well. My three step instructions I describe below address the issue in a systematic way.
1. Concept Learning: Direct & Complete Depiction
My focus here is to teach students differences between symbolic, superficial, partial, summary, and direct & complete depictions. One of the important concepts I teach here is that direct and complete depictions often have higher instructional values than symbolic, superficial, partial, or summary depictions when communicating concrete messages as it is often the case with classroom instructions. The most important and challenging part of learning is to understand concepts, processes, or systems - in other words, how things work individually and as a whole. It is a process of mental model construction. And concrete messages coupled with direct and complete depiction techniques greatly enhance mental model construction (i.e., student comprehension). As most students are not used to the direct and complete depiction techniques, I show examples through demonstrations and videos.
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2. Analysis & Critique
You have to be able to walk before you can run, so I have my students analyze and evaluate some bad and good visual literacy skills observed in a video presentation. In this exercise, we watch the video presentation together, and I occasionally pause the video to ask these three questions:
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3. Create: Screencast Project
Through creating a screencast video, students will further strengthen their understanding of direct & complete depiction techniques, and also learn to use those techniques to aid the process of mental model construction in multimedia creation and instructions. Since I want students to focus on creating visuals, I provide them with pre-written scripts, which they will have to read and record for the video production. To facilitate student thinking, I have students create a storyboard as they actually develop screencast videos. Their screencast videos are rigorously evaluated on how well visuals augment the voice-over narration. Here are some examples that my students created.
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