Site of the Week Archive:
Great links to 4+ years of
media literacy education-related Sites of the Week

Visual & Aural Literacy

In 1982, the international agency UNESCO declared, “We must prepare young people for living in a world of images, words and sounds.”

Nearly 30 years later, lots of resources are available for teaching about the power and impact of our image culture (that's media literacy -- see the rest of this website) and about how one can learn to better use visual images in comunication (that's visual literacy -- see links below).

What about sounds? There's little in traditional media education on the study of how sounds affect communication (aural literacy). What we hear -- especially music --plays a huge role in human interpretation of media messages. See what we've found below.

Visual Literacy

"People everyone need to learn how to express their ideas using pictures and graphics instead of text. That's because words undergo a strange transformation when they travel from the page or computer to the large screen -- they become incredibly boring." Tad Simons, former editor in chief of the (sadly) now out-of-print Presentations magazine.

International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA) is "concerned with issues dealing with education, instruction and training in modes of visual communication and their application through the concept of visual literacy to individuals, groups, organizations, and to the public in general."

Visual Teaching Alliance is a team of educators offering professional development workshops in visual learning and teaching. [Thank you to Michael Kennedy for recommending this link.]

Online Resources

Information goes out to play, an excellent article on the BBC NewsMagazine website.

The webiste Visual Literacy K-8 has very good information from Steve Moline, author of I See What You Mean: Children at Work with Visual Information.

Artful Truth-Healthy Propaganda Arts Project is about the messages constantly being sent to us by the objects and images we see in the world around us.

Center for Media Literacy This is a consulting business which grew out of the former non-profit of the same name. The company's website still has the excellent CML Reading Room, with articles on issues related to visual literacy.

The American Association of School Librarians devoted the January/February 2008 issue of Knowledge Quest to visual literacy.

The Association of College & Research Libraries has an excellent section on Visual literacy resources on the Web.

Stanford University visiting scholar Robert E. Horn's website has many fantastic resources for learning to be a better visual communicator. Examples of Argumentation Maps, Info-Murals as public art, Visual Analytics for Public Policy, Social Mess Maps, and more. Highly recommended.

Maps and cartograms of the 2008 and 2004 US presidential election results were created by University of Michigan students to show how normal geographical maps can skew (and thus mis-represent) your perception of how many people voted for what (or whom). The cartograms, which skew the shapes of states to allow for population differences, show how non-standard visual representations can more accurately tell a story. Check out the FAQ, whose last answer provides links to other data maps.

Media Literacy Clearinghouse Lots of good links here on visual literacy.

Visual-Literacy.org is a Swiss organization hosting an e-learning site for a university-level tutorial in visual literacy. The tutorial is accessible only to registered students, but this spectacular Periodic Table of Visualization Methods will thrill anyone who's interested in information presentation. It looks like the Periodic Table of Elements but instead each box represents a visual style of representing information -- from simple pie chart to amazing diagrams done in specific styles. Hover your mouse over any given box on the chart and a window will appear showing you a sample of what that visualization method looks like in real use.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Here's a Wordle made from the text on the home page of this websiste.

Worth1000.com Be careful or you can waste an hour here checking out the often hysterical, frequently weird Photoshopped images. This website runs dozens of contests simultaneously to find the "best" in altered images, in many different themed categories (such as Visual Puns, and Stupid Protests) that change constantly. Viewers may post comments about any photo. Teachers: visit first before sending your students here, a few images and captions are for more mature audiences, but most are very mainstream and usually hysterically funny. Excellent visual literacy lessons here, not only in the power to alter what we think is "real" just by using Adobe Photoshop, but also great lessons in how to transmit an idea or concept through images rather than words (hence the site name, from the American idiom, "A picture is worth a thousand words.").

Aural Literacy

“Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.” Sure, but corporate marketers also use music to seduce you to buy stuff, so a media literate person needs to know how it’s being used for those purposes. Sound effects and music make media products -- TV, film, videos, computer and video games, etc. -- larger than life, so aural literacy is vital to being an informed consumer of media in the 21st century.

Online Resources

Websites related to the work of Margaret Noble, a media artist and digital media teacher at High Tech High in San Diego, California. Her site as a "sound artist" is here; her student's impressive work in many areas including sound is here.

Books & Software

Adobe® Visual Communicator® software "offers customizable graphics, music, and special effects to create video presentations that look like a television newscast. The teleprompter allows users to speak confidently without memorizing lines. Presentations can be delivered via email, the Internet, CD, DVD, or live over a Channel One Closed Circuit TV system." We've used this product and it's very easy to learn. The provided backgrounds and music are a little too flashy for our taste, but young people will probably love it, as it makes them look and sound like professional newscasters.

Music and Emotion: Theory and Research (Series in Affective Science) (See all Music Appreciation Books) Film students take note: "The second section addresses the role of our emotions in the composition of music, the ways that emotions can be communicated via musical structures, and the use of music to express emotions within the cinema."

Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination (See all Music Theory Books) "What makes a distant oboe's wail beautiful? Why do some kinds of music lift us to ecstasy, but not others? Lyrically interweaving discoveries from science, psychology, music theory, paleontology, and philosophy, Robert Jourdian brilliantly examines why music speaks to us in ways that words cannot, and why we form such powerful connections to it. "

The Social Psychology of Music (See all Music Books) Chapter titles include Gender and music, The role of music in society, and Music and consumer behavior.