Timothy Gangwer's Blog (745)

An Introduction to Visual Culture

Modern life takes place onscreen. Life in industrialized countries is increasingly lived under constant video surveillance from cameras in buses and shopping malls, on highways and bridges, and next to ATM cash machines. More and more people look back, using devices ranging from traditional cameras to camcorders and Webcams. At the same time, work and leisure are centred on visual media from computers to Digital Video Disks. Human experience is now more visual and visualized than ever before… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 27, 2009 at 11:11am — No Comments

Color in an Optimum Learning Environment

Color is an important factor in the physical learning environment and is a major element in interior design that impacts student achievement, as well as teacher effectiveness and staff efficiency. Research has demonstrated that specific colors and patterns directly influence the health, morale, emotions, behavior, and performance of learners, depending on the individual’s culture, age, gender, and developmental level, the subject being studied, and the activity being conducted.



Color… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 23, 2009 at 10:27am — No Comments

Visual-Spatial Intelligence

The ability to accurately perceive the visual world and to re-create, manipulate and modify aspects of one's perceptions (even in the absence of the relevant visual stimuli). Visual-spatial intelligence deals with shapes, patterns, designs and the entire spectrum of colour - and with the placement and relationship of objects in space, including distance and direction. It includes our capacity to visualise, dream and imagine.



CHARACTERISTICS



Attention to visual… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 22, 2009 at 9:46am — No Comments

Why Visual Literacy

The incessant broadcast and print recycling of the April 2003 Reuters photograph of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad revealed the importance of art--specifically commemorative sculptural portraits--to the Iraqis. It also demonstrated importance of media images to people all over the world. What do such images mean? Why are they so important?



In a television-dominated society, each person must develop the ability to create his or her own… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 21, 2009 at 11:20am — No Comments

Picture This: Literary Theory and the Study of Visual Culture

An address delivered at La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, March 2000



In my remarks this afternoon I want to raise some questions about how we have historicized the concept of the visual in visual culture studies. I will be arguing that how we historicize visual culture is inextricably linked to how we theorize the visual and visuality. Visual culture studies has developed around the idea that postmodernity is dominated by the visual representation of meaning, and that this marks its… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 20, 2009 at 9:12am — No Comments

Eidetic Imagery

Everyone knows what it is like to close one's eyes and call up a visual image using the "mind's eye." For most people this image is usually fleeting and undetailed, but for those who possess an ability for eidetic imagery, this image is like a tangible picture that can be manipulated and seen in great detail.



Eidetic imagery is a psychological puzzle that has multiple definitions, an extensive history, and a long list of characteristics. The exact relationship between eidetic imagery… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 16, 2009 at 10:34am — No Comments

'Minds Eye' Influences Visual Perception

Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the "mind's eye"—directly impacts our visual perception.



"We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception," says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. "This is the first research to definitively show… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 13, 2009 at 10:39am — No Comments

Media and Attention, Cognition, and School Achievement

Introduction



Marie Evans Schmidt and Elizabeth Vandewater review research on links between various types of electronic media and the cognitive skills of school-aged children and adolescents. One central finding of studies to date, they say, is that the content delivered by electronic media is far more influential than the media themselves.



Most studies, they point out, find a small negative link between the total hours a child spends viewing TV and that child's… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 10, 2009 at 10:02am — No Comments

Visual Culture

What is Visual Culture?



Visual culture is concerned with everything we see, have seen, or may visualize-paintings, sculptures, movies, television, photographs, furniture, utensils, gardens, dance, buildings, artifacts, landscape, toys, advertising, jewelry, apparel, light, graphs, maps, websites, dreams-in short, all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means. We draw on methodologies from the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. We focus on… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 8, 2009 at 8:50am — No Comments

Technology That Enhances Visual-Spatial Intelligence

Today's students have grown up watching television and are highly oriented to visual learning. Slides, overhead transparencies, filmstrips, and movies are important adjuncts to their learning. Copy-machines and computer- printers are also essential support systems for any kind of academic work. When interactive systems are also part of the learning process, students move from passive observers to active thinkers.



For example the VCR, which is available to most teachers, lends itself… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 6, 2009 at 9:40am — No Comments

Introducing Visual Culture: Ways of Looking at All Things Visual

Emergence of a new paradigm for studying all forms of visual culture as parts of a cross-media system



Some Key Points to Consider



- "Visual Culture" studies recognizes the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the postmodern world.



- Has there been a social and cultural shift to the visual, over against the verbal and textual, in the past 50 years, and has it been accelerating in the past 10 or 20 years?

- Or… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on July 2, 2009 at 9:24am — No Comments

Moving Toward Visual Literacy: Photography as a Language of Teacher Inquiry

Introduction



During the past two decades in the United States, teacher inquiry has become a dominant focus of contemporary early childhood teacher education programs (Hill, Stremmel, & Fu, 2004; Hubbard & Power, 2003; Burnaford, Fischer, & Hobson, 2001; Moran, 2002; Fosnot, 1989). Teacher inquiry is characterized by "both new and experienced teachers [who] pose problems, identify discrepancies between theories and practices, challenge common routines, draw on the… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 30, 2009 at 9:41am — No Comments

Will Video Games Reshape Education?

Scientists call it the next great discovery, a way to captivate students so much they will spend hours learning on their own. It's the new vision of video games. The Federation of American Scientists--which typically weighs in on matters of nuclear weaponry and government secrecy--recently declared that video games can redefine education. Capping a year of study, the group has called for federal research into how the addictive pizzazz of video games can be converted into serious learning tools… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 29, 2009 at 9:32am — No Comments

Thoughts On Visual Teaching

Many people think verbally. The spoken language flows through the thought processes like a typewriter creating a story. All people think visually, continually translating words and ideas it pictures so that concepts and thoughts surface. In other words, we all understand, or decode, the visual language, but a true visual thinker has nonlinear thought, as if to be exercising cognition through computer simulation, then transforming the data into animation, or encoding. Thoughts become movies,… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 25, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments

A Personal Story

Friends’ Gate



I had heard so many negative things concerning a new student prior to his enrollment that I chose not to review his records when they arrived. I felt that because he did not have to sift through my old baggage, perhaps I should not sift through his. I decided we would begin on unbiased, neutral grounds. I did choose, however, to read his medical and family background.



Jonathan was born in 1980 in Houston. After his mother abandoned him, his maternal… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 23, 2009 at 10:44am — 1 Comment

Visual Thinking in Education (Visual-Verbal Language in Learning & Teaching)

Visual Representations: Literal and Symbolic



When discussing the communication of visual meaning it is useful to distinguish between literal representations that are intended to resemble the object they portray, and symbolic representations. { These categories can also be labeled using other terms, such as realistic and abstract, respectively. } Of course, there is a continuous range between literal and symbolic, and many pedagogically useful pictures are a complex mixture… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 22, 2009 at 10:48am — No Comments

7 Things You Should Know About "Google Earth"

Scenario



As part of a course on U.S. history, Alexander is writing a paper about the Lewis and Clark expedition, focusing on a critical decision. When the party arrived at a fork in the river in June 1805, the crew believed the north fork was the proper route; Captains Lewis and Clark thought the south course would get them to the Pacific Ocean. Alexander looks at the area on Google Earth, which helps him understand the geography of this part of Montana.



Alexander… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 19, 2009 at 11:27am — No Comments

History of Interest in the Visual-Spatial Learner

Analysis of psychometric patterns and clinical observations led to the development of the visual-spatial construct in 1982. The paper, “The Visual-Spatial Learner” received positive responses from clients and from students at the University of Denver and North Carolina State University. In July, 1987, it was presented to an international audience under the title “Global Learners” at the Seventh World Conference on Gifted and Talented Children. Four months later, it was incorporated into a model… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 16, 2009 at 9:44am — No Comments

Visual Skills in the Learning Process

There are some specific required visual skills that one must have in order to have effective reading and learning abilities. With proper diagnostics, a visual learning obstacle, in most cases, can easily be transformed by working on a specific task to improve the specific functionality that the brain employs to perform a task. This article is the first in a two-part series that talks about the visual process that occurs while one is learning and identifies some physical symptoms that can… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 10, 2009 at 1:54pm — No Comments

Language Cues Provide 'Glue' For Visual Learning In Children

Language cues can provide the "glue" that helps fasten certain visual patterns into small children's memories, according to results to be presented by a Johns Hopkins University graduate student at the 17th annual meeting of the American Psychological Society, held May 26-29 in Los Angeles.



This new data provide insight into the long-debated question of whether language affects thought.



Doctoral candidate Banchiamlack Dessalegn and her mentor, Barbara Landau, the Dick and… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on June 9, 2009 at 10:11am — No Comments

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