Full Circle Associates

Now here is a woman who knows the power of a visual in a blog. vitriolica webb's ite. And humor... oh yea!

In my musing about online competencies, one thing comes up over and over again: visual literacy. The ability to convey ideas visually. To learn from visuals. Here is a beautiful living example.

For more on visual literacy as part of a larger compentency in our new world, see The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit which crossed my desk via Stephen Downes.

A profound shift is taking place in the way people communicate and express themselves. Fueled by media that increasingly are crafted for a global audience, pervasive access to goods and services from ever more distant locales, access to networks and communication services that span the planet, and generational ties between youth that transcend borders, a new concept of language — and what it means to be literate — is evolving. Unlike the traditional notions of language and literacy, which are primarily unimodal and textual, this new form of communication and self-expression occurs multimodally, incorporating visual and aural elements with textual elements, and an immediacy which itself is a dimension of the new language. Technology, which has done much to make the creation and dissemination of written communication a familiar everyday occurrence for most people, plays an especially important role in these new forms as well. Tools that allow sophisticated manipulation and creation of images, video, and sound are more and more commonplace, and they are especially well known among those most fluent in these new language forms.