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A quick guide to visual literacy and sources for more information, from the Association of College and Research Libraries

At the GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning Katy Crossley-Frolick at Denison University discusses her use of a dialogue mapping tool to help students unpack complex concepts.

This is an amusing visualization of the connection between Bloom's taxonomy and cognitive and classroom activities. I like the way it addresses complexity without the strict hierarchy of the more common pyramid visualization.

Some potentially interesting implications here for the way we use example objects, visualizations and illustrations when presenting information.

A collection of resources on visual thinking in teaching and learning.

One way students used storyboards to improve presentation posters.

A 16-question online questionnaire to help students identify their preference for a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning style. Also includes some information about the styles.

This is the VRA's statement on how fair use of still images can be applied in many instances in an educational setting. Such instances include use by teachers in lessons and by students in transforming a work for an assignment (among others).

According to the authors, much of what is widely claimed about learning styles - primarily that learners learn best when they learn in their preferred mode, be it visually, auditorily, or kinesthetically - is simply not backed up with research. They believe that the widespread belief in learning styles has real costs to teachers and students. Faculty neglect other, well-established learning theories and students neglect other modes of learning out of a misplaced belief that they can't learn well in those modes.

A study of images used by articles in selected history journals from 2000 to 2009 shows no increase in the use of images, despite the boom in online images generally and digitized historical images in particular. How should this impact digitization strategies and visual literacy efforts?

A discussion of the meaning and practical interpretation by recent courts of the term "transformative." Folks in the fields of literature, music, and visual arts will find synopses of recent cases covering the specific application of the law with respect to their media. While not necessarily of direct importance to academicians in the classroom, these synopses should be of interest to anyone (faculty and students) who produce outside of the classroom.

Interested in tools that make course content more accessible to students with visual and cognitive challenges? Two free Microsoft products features their Immersive Reader tool, which reads aloud text for users.

Universal design for learning ultimately saves labor, and benefits all learners in the class. "So if I take a little more time and effort to make my writing large, legible, and organized on the white board, I am going to help the student with visual impairments - but I'm also going to help everyone in the room take better notes on our discussion. If I take the time to create slides with a minimal amount of text or images - and then encourage students to take their own notes by filling in the examples and ideas from the lecture or discussion - I'm helping everyone push beyond simply copying down lecture notes and regurgitating the course content."

An interesting concept map of different theories of how we learn (or learn best), and how they relate. It's admittedly oversimplified, but an interesting start. (Also an example of what you can make with mind-mapping software.)