The teaching of information, visual, and design literacies across the curriculum is a task many of us are undertaking. One exciting 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 represent the data visually, and then ask 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 in the 27 infographics, they offer an excellent 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. Using these literacies (and technology literacy by having students create their own graphics) makes so much sense to help reach our course learning outcomes.
As you review some of the 27 examples, what ideas come to mind for your classroom?
