Visual Teaching Alliance

Timothy Gangwer's Blog (745)

Critical Perspectives on Visual Imagery in Media and Cyberculture

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak." - John Berger

Developing a critical approach to visual culture requires, first of all, recognizing the central importance of visual imagery in contemporary culture. As my opening epigram from John Berger suggests, visual images have long been of utmost significance for human life and our ways of seeing. Indeed, how we interact with and interpret visual images is a basic component of human… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 23, 2009 at 9:35am — No Comments

Your Intelligence and Your Environment

Humans are survivors.

We’ve survived extreme desert heat, bitter artic cold and killer diseases. Our ability to adapt has allowed us to travel the globe and prosper all over the world – from the Sahara desert to the Artic wastelands, man has settled.

Over time our bodies have adapted to these different conditions: humans living near the equator have developed darker skin to protect them from the harsh sun; those living further away developed lighter skin so that they could… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 21, 2009 at 11:43am — No Comments

How to Mind Map

1. Turn a large A4 (11.7" x 8.3") or preferably A3 (16.7" x 11.7"), white sheet of paper on it's side (landscape), or use a Mind Map pad. Gather a selection of coloured pens, ranging from fine nib to medium and highlighters.

2. Select the topic, problem or subject to be Mind Mapped.

3. Gather any materials or research or additional information.

4. Start in the centre with an unframed image – approximately 6cm high and wide for an A4 and 10cm for an… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 15, 2009 at 10:59am — No Comments

Four Faces of Art Education

One of the problems with trying to gain more prominence for art education in K-12 schools is that the field has been narrowly defined to focus mainly on the aesthetics of personal exploration characterized by the fine arts. I suggest that we improve the chances that students will gain knowledge and skills in visual art by broadening the conception of the subject to include visual culture, visual design, and visual communication.

Elliot Eisner, from Stanford University, and others… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 13, 2009 at 5:08pm — No Comments

Footnotes: Visual Thinking Techniques

Western society is dominated by words. Linear, lexical information transmission is the norm, and most of us don’t think twice about it. We train our children to think and learn in words from a very early age, marginalising alternative ways of processing information. We know that children learn through play, but we hope that they learn to read and write sooner rather than later. We assume that traditional words-based teaching and training methods are right and proper, and that people who don’t… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 11, 2009 at 11:44am — No Comments

Visual Pollution

The word pollution implies a negative impact on our environment. When a reference is made to polluting the environment we commonly think of land, air and water pollution. The types of images we conger up are the dumping of chemicals into our environment, toxic smoke being released into the air, litter lining our streets and parks, poisonous chemicals flowing into our ponds & rivers, toxins and heavy metals penetrating our ground water supplies. But not all forms of pollution are toxic or… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 9, 2009 at 6:56pm — No Comments

Is Technology Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking and Analysis?

Studies Shed Light on Multi-Tasking, Video Games and Learning

Published on 28 January 2009, by Insciences

- Stuart Wolpert

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Learners have… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 8, 2009 at 5:08pm — No Comments

Visual Learners Convert Words To Pictures In The Brain And Vice Versa

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2009)

A University of Pennsylvania psychology study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan the brain, reveals that people who consider themselves visual learners, as opposed to verbal learners, have a tendency to convert linguistically presented information into a visual mental representation.

The more strongly an individual identified with the visual cognitive style, the more that individual activated the… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 6, 2009 at 11:11pm — No Comments

Now You See It, Now You Don't

Now You See It, Now You Don't: 'Change Blindness' Isn't Magic

ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2005)

A team of scientists at UCL (University College London) has discovered why we often miss major changes in our surroundings - such as a traffic light turning green when we're listening to the radio. Our inability to notice large changes in a visual scene is a phenomenon often exploited by magicians - but only now can scientists put their finger on the exact part of the… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 5, 2009 at 10:14am — No Comments

Visual Echoes

Echoes Discovered In Early Visual Brain Areas Play Role In Working Memory

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2009)

Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that early visual areas, long believed to play no role in higher cognitive functions such as memory, retain information previously hidden from brain studies. The researchers made the discovery using a new technique for decoding data from functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. The findings are a significant… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 4, 2009 at 8:31am — No Comments

Visual Hard Drive

The amount of information we can remember from a visual scene is extremely limited and the source of that limit may lie in the posterior parietal cortex, a region of the brain involved in visual short-term memory, Vanderbilt psychologist René Marois and graduate student J. Jay Todd have found. Their results were published in the April 15 edition of Nature.

"Visual short-term memory is a key component of many perceptual and cognitive functions and is supported by a broad neural… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on April 2, 2009 at 9:34pm — No Comments

Possible Theoretical Breakdown

Dorothy Lehmkuhl applies a popular classification of right-brained or left brained thinking when she identifies the right brained learner as primarily visual/spatial and left brained learner as auditory/linguistic. She goes on to say that the right brained learner is more sensual, creative, direct and even primitive. Interestingly, it is the left brain that by contrast “responds to basic sensory experiences: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell – through words, thus losing much emotional… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 31, 2009 at 6:49pm — No Comments

External Seeing

It is undeniable that the brain’s ability to interpret “external seeing” is complex and multi-faceted. Through the two processes of “visual simile” and “pattern seeking”, the learner acquires knowledge visually. The associative flexibility of the mind to make visual similes allows learners to break away from objectivity and glimpse a profound reality that lies within an object or idea. Activities in external seeing which are indicators of this type of learning are: upside-down drawing, drawing… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 31, 2009 at 6:41pm — No Comments

A Strong Visual Intelligence

Core Characteristics:

• Spatial Awareness - solving problems using spatial orientation

• Non-sequential Reasoning - thinking in divergent ways

• Visual Acuity - assessment of information based on principals of design and aesthetics

• Imagination - seeing the possibilities before engaging them in the physical world

• Small motor coordination - creating, building, arranging, decorating

Students with a strong visual intelligence:

•… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 31, 2009 at 10:40am — No Comments

Visual Intelligence

After his stroke, Mr. P still had outstanding memory and intelligence. He could still read and talk, and mixed well with the other patients on his ward. His vision was in most respects normal---with one notable exception: He couldn't recognize the faces of people or animals. As he put it himself, "I can see the eyes, nose, and mouth quite clearly, but they just don't add up. They all seem chalked in, like on a blackboard ... I have to tell by the clothes or by the voice whether it is a man or a… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 31, 2009 at 10:24am — No Comments

Are You a Visual-Spatial Learner?

Please complete this questionnaire to find out how your brain works! Answer "Yes" or "No" to the following questions ("Sometimes" = "Yes").

1. Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words? _____

2. Are you good at solving puzzles or mazes? _____

3. Do you like to construct things with your hands? _____

4. Do you often lose track of time? _____

5. Do you know things without being able to tell how or why? _____

6. Do you… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 30, 2009 at 10:49am — No Comments

Employing Visual Metaphors

Just as important as any other aspect of visual rhetoric is the use of visual metaphor and the recognition that we often use visual metaphors as a way of understanding the world.

Robert N. St. Clair in Visual Metaphor, Cultural Knowledge, and the New Rhetoric, provides this example of the way metaphors function as cognitive models, or ways of knowing:

A teacher who sees students as fragile human beings is using metaphor. He treats them as eggs and is afraid to hurt… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 29, 2009 at 11:12pm — No Comments

Visual Rhetoric/Visual Literacy

Are you trying to “read” a picture or “write” a website? Have you been asked to evaluate or reflect on a symbol or visual image? Hopefully, this handout and the others in this series will give you a place to think about how the elements of communication and persuasion are embedded in texts you don’t just read but see. Images, not just words, provide us with information and change the ways we think, reason, and act. They can speak to us in powerful ways.

The simplest definition for… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 29, 2009 at 11:03pm — No Comments

The Six Methods of Visual Listening

A MULTI-SENSORY APPROACH TO VISUAL LISTENING

Making a room too quiet for comfort is a common mistake. Extremely quiet rooms can produce a feeling of sensory deprivation. Music, on the other hand, can soothe emotions and excite enthusiasm, while giving students a sense of cultural identity.

New studies suggest that playing music—and even just listening to it—may improve learning, memory, logic and general creativity. Plato once said, "Music is a more potent… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 27, 2009 at 10:19am — No Comments

A Rationale for Visual Communication

Just as reading is fundamental to education, visual communication is a tool professors must use effectively—and pass along to their students.

In 1992 I was setting up a studio for a new computer art course at the College of DuPage. Needing a break, I went to visit my brother Don outside of Nashville.

Shortly after I arrived, we were looking at a problem he was having with his PC. His then three-year-old son, Clint, wanted to help.

He climbed into his… Continue

Added by Timothy Gangwer on March 25, 2009 at 10:30am — No Comments