I'm getting ready for the eLearning Forum session on Learning Visually in April, so this blog is becoming my dumping ground for potential material.
From Inspiration's site, here's a piece on Visual Learning:
Visual learning techniques help students:
Clarify thinking. Students see how ideas are connected and realize how information can be grouped or organized. With visual learning, new concepts are more thoroughly and easily understood.
Reinforce understanding. Students recreate, in their own words, what they've learned. This helps them absorb and internalize new information, giving them ownership of their ideas.
Integrate new knowledge. Diagrams updated throughout a lesson prompt students to build upon prior knowledge and internalize new information. By reviewing diagrams created previously, students see how facts and ideas fit together.
Identify misconceptions. Just as a concept map or web shows what students know, misdirected links or wrong connections reveal what they don't understand.
Mary Alice White, a researcher at Columbia Teacher's College has found that young people learn more than half of what they know from visual information, but few schools have an explicit curriculum to show students how to think critically about visual data.
In a society where powerful interests employ visual data to persuade (what Alvin Toffler calls "info-tactics") schools must show students how to look beyond the surface to understand deeper levels of meaning and tactics employed to sway their thinking. There is a danger that these images will serve as decoration rather than information unless we show them how to interpret (make meaning of) the data.
