There is a burgeoning need to categorize and reshape today's information in innovative, recognizable, image-based ways. Now, with the onslaught of visual stimuli, from the Internet to infographics, there is a need to represent pictorially the multi-dimensional world of 3D and 4G information. From an educational standpoint, this means designing complex information for a range of learners. The manipulation of data through the use of images is crucial to understanding facets of meaning.

ASIDE 2011

Graphicacy represents an emerging literacy joining mathematical, textual, media, technological, and financial proficiencies. It moves beyond just being "visually literate" and instead combines mathematics, statistical analysis, geographic interpretation, and graphic design. Graphicacy is the ability to analyze and interpret information in a graphical form. It delineates clear, achievable skills that encapsulate the necessary benchmarks for today's children and tomorrow's professionals. Essentially, teachers must design information for educational use and also help their students decode the visual galaxy that encompasses their current world.

The crucial skill of graphicacy is vital to sustaining the relevance of a school's curriculum and also to sustaining the prominence of school graduates in a competitive marketplace. Students must be graphically literate to be informed, as they slice data, images, and words into layers of information and construct relational meanings. Graphicacy education, like literacy, oracy, and numeracy, completes the lines of communication necessary for learners in the 21^st century.

Resources:
The Emergence of Graphicacy by Poracsky, Young, Patton
Graphicacy: The Third Skill by Spielman
Graphicacy as a Form of Communication by Wilmot

Author: Serge Esteves

The New York Times frequently features excellent graphics in its news analysis. Its explanations of the Fukushima plant disaster helped educate readers about nuclear science and radiation risk. Its maps and political charts regularly add insights to daily issues under discussion. Online, the New York Times site offers interactive graphics about topics such as immigration changes or Netflix queues or Olympic medals. In the Op-Ed pages, regular contributor Charles M. Blow delivers astute commentary through his “Op Chart” column.

Weeklies such as Time, BusinessWeek, and The Economist all feature full-page infographics to encapsulate the main ideas behind their cover stories.

Source: Time Magazine

Regardless of medium or era, education has always been the act of offering information for acquisition. “Learning” is the individual process, where one internalizes new concepts or skills. “Education,” though, is the active delivery – the technique of shaping and structuring ideas by an instructor so they are assumed readily and permanently by a student.

The two most obvious changes in educational delivery over the past 15 years have been the visual representation and immediacy of information.

Communication has advanced along an accelerating continuum from the town crier to the printing press to the telephone, radio, television, and Internet. The change in fact-finding, however, is different from simple communication.

The New Bloom's Taxonomy - Author: Samantha Penney

Information channeling today is other-dimensional compared to the patterned practice of 20 years ago. In 1990, when a student needed to write a report on penguins or General Motors, he or she was dutifully dropped off at the library by a parent and picked up eight hours later with a folder of Xeroxes and microfiche printouts. Today the rapid and overwhelming access to information leads to a host of questions regarding accuracy, propriety, and property. Also, these facts and opinions are typically encountered on the visual screen.

Howard Gardner’s learning styles seem somewhat quaint today now that every child is a visual learner. An updated system should be called “Visual+”, meaning “visual” and then some other intelligence. From infancy, kids are babysat by televisions. They absorb fairy tales from picture books and point to themselves in their own digital photographs. As teachers, we, too, rely on the immediate, pictorial nature of facts when we need to find a quick historical photograph in Wikimedia or search directions on Google Maps or snap a QR code with our smartphones.

We try to remember that if we as teachers aren't using something anymore, it seems strange to make our students use it -- just because "we did it when we were their age."