Visual information literacy via visual means: three heuristics

Visual Literacy and Visual Culture

Familiarity with specific images or sets of images plays a role in a culture's visual heritage. Two questions can be asked about this type of visual literacy: Is this a type of knowledge that is worth building into the formal educational curriculum of our schools? What are the educational implications of visual literacy? There is a three-part educational rationale to these questions. First, kno...

Film: Visual Literacy

People who write about movies have traditionally referred to the conventions of cinematic representation—such things as low-angle shots, fade-outs, or flashbacks—as the “language” of film. Does the ability to understand this language require previous experience? Or, to put this question differently, would a “naive” viewer, someone who had never seen a movie before, be able to make any sense of ...

Appreciating, Interpreting and Understanding Posters via Levels of Visual Literacy

This study was conducted in Malaysia to discover how meaning and appreciation were construed among 35 Form Five students. Panofsky’s theory was employed to discover the levels of reasoning among students when various types of posters were displayed. The independent variables used were posters that carried explicit and implicit meanings; the moderating variable was students’ visual literacy leve...

Conceptual Problems Of Visual Literacy

1 Perspective Of Visual Literacy

An alternative to the common approach to defining concepts is introduced, where the primary goal is to point to what is large and essential in a concept, that is, to its perspective. Based on this new approach, visual literacy is defined as the ability to decode and design implicit information. It is argued that such literacy is no less needed than the common literacy, which is the ability to r...