2nd Blog Check Start -Week 6- Visual Literacy and Digital Storytelling

This week we learned about visual literacy as well as digital storytelling.

We learned that in order to be visually literate one must first know the basic elements of visual communication. Some of these elements include: dots, lines, shapes, direction, value, hue, saturation, texture, etc. The article discussed how even cave paintings, while today we may see them as primitive, held a special cultural and significant meaning to the artist who painted them. These painting encouraged visual literacy because although there were no words to read, one could infer what the artist was trying to say through understanding the symbols. Over time these paintings and symbols gradually turned into the alphabet as we know it today.

Digital storytelling is similar to visual literacy only it uses "computer based tools" to convey a story. With the computers help, one can use videos, music, text, etc. to help bring their stories to life instead of the traditional way of still images and voice. There are some similarities between digital storytelling and the traditional way however, both tend to focus on one specific subject and come from one point of view. Any subject can be told thorough this media, whether it be educational, such as a history story, or just for fun, like an old fable. Digital storytelling has been very popular in the education setting. It draws the kids out from their passive textbook and into a world where they can actively learn. When using digital storytelling to educate the videos tend to be around 2-10 minutes. Any shorter and one can't convey the message, however too long and the child may lose interest.

Digital storytelling is very much related to telecommunications. Telling a story or message is exactly what my major is about. Whether it's creating a public service announcement or a movie, I would be using the same elements like text, point of view, video, and music to convey a message. The only real difference would be that sometimes the videos I make may be longer than 10 minutes.

The video I found uses digital storytelling (video/images/clips) to explain what digital storytelling is and how it can be a learning aid in a classroom.

Week 5 - Media & Information Literacy

In this weeks assignment we learned about visual literacy.

Visual literacy is being able to recognize commands in the form of pictures(visual encoding) and interpret what actions to take based on those images(visual decoding). For example, if you see a picture of a dog with a red line through it outside a restaurant, one can interpret it to mean that dogs are not allowed inside the building. It is interesting to see how much we use visual literacy in our daily lives! Driving almost entirely depends on it with all the different signs that mean certain things.

Visual literacy is important if I were to use my telecommunication degree to produce videos, tv shows, or films.It is a very big taboo to have a character explain to the audience things in the show. Therefore visual literacy is needed so the audience can follow along and not be confused at why a character is doing what they are doing. For example, instead of a character saying to another character " I have to be careful around this cliff cause rocks could fall on me" I could just film a close up of the falling rocks sign and the audience would be able to interpret the meaning.

In this video, the message that is discussed is that visual literacy is very important in interpreting advertising, signs, etc. It shows that while images may relate in content, the interpretation of those images may be totally different. It provides many examples where visual literacy is needed. It even goes on to suggest that not only do different visual images affect our interpretation of them, but the cultural context in which we are exposed to them, the medium they are shown in, etc.