Lessons Learned

The teaching of information, visual and design literacies across the curriculum is a task many of us are undertaking. One interesting possibility to teach all three together would be to look at the world financial crisis by having our students research the validity of the numbers being shared in the media, challenge them to visually represent the data and to then task them to communicate the information in a well-designed presentation. The folks at Flowing Data offer several examples of such an effort in their 27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis post. While one cannot be sure about the validity of the numbers presented in the 27 infographics, they do offer a wonderful opportunity to engage students to think about data, cause & effect and the power of visuals to get a message across.

There are so many other topics and available tools that can be used to have our students produce similar learning products for our classrooms. It makes so much sense to use these literacies (and technology literacy by having students create their own graphics) to help reach our course learning outcomes.

As you review some of the 27 examples, what are some ideas that come to mind for your classroom?