With this nation's renewed interest in children and education in the 1990s, there have been significant signs of recent growth in the media literacy movement emerging in the United States. In the State of North Carolina, for example, media literacy is included in both the Communication Skills (English) curriculum and in the Information Skills curriculum. In many communities, educators have begun the process of thinking seriously about expanding the concept of literacy to include media. While there was only one teacher-training program in media literacy in 1993, in 1994 there were 12 different programs held across the United States. However, in most communities, media literacy exists due to the energy and initiative of a single teacher, not because of a coordinated, community-wide programmatic plan of implementation. At present, only one such plan is now underway, in the community of Billerica, Massachusetts, which is developing a comprehensive media literacy program that reaches all students across the curriculum in grades K - 12.
Dr. Sorin Adam Matei on 21 Feb 09Exploratory visualization based on multiple coordinated views is a rapidly growing area of information visualization. Ideally, users would be able to explore their data by switching freely between building and browsing in a flexible, integrated, interactive graphical environment that requires little or no programming skill to use. However, the possibilities for displaying data across multiple views depends on the flexibility of coordination, the expressiveness of graphical encoding, and the ability of users to comprehend the structure of their visualizations as they work. As a result, exploration has been limited in practice to a small fraction of useful visualizations. Improvise is a fully-implemented Java software architecture and user interface that enables users to build and browse highly-coordinated visualizations interactively. By coupling a shared-object coordination model with a declarative visual query language, users gain precise control over how navigation and selection affects the appearance of data across multiple views, using a potentially infinite number of variations on well-known coordination patterns such as synchronized scrolling, overview+detail, brushing, drill-down, and semantic zoom. Improvise has been used to build numerous visualizations for exploring information including election results, particle trajectories, network loads, music collections, the chemical elements, and even the dynamic coordination structure of its own visualizations in situ. This last technique-integrated metavisualization-is unique to Improvise.
