Teaching Social Literacy Through Communication Design

Source: TED

As middle school advisors, we constantly deal with the trials and tribulations resulting from miscommunication. One thing we try to convey to the middle school mind is that in order to fully understand a message, they need to recognize that key factors play into how information is received.

The relationship between communication and interaction goes hand in hand with perception. The more we can develop their acuity in reading verbal and written cues, the more we can decrease the problems of misreading messages. Without a doubt, our job becomes increasingly more difficult due to electronic media pushing response times to lightning speed.

Since communication is central to design and relies heavily on how media connects with people, it stands to reason that we need to help our students identify where things can get misconstrued. We see it as “social literacy.” Like other literacies, they need to learn the skills in how to respond in order to avoid any misinterpretations that might arise.

While it isn’t always easy, we found that using the video entitled "How To Recognize Misinformation" with our advisees helps. It promotes healthy discussions as well as practical techniques for students to role-play.

The animation visually communicates how people get the wrong idea by failing to recognize their own personal responses to gestures, tone, and body language. These missed social cues can lead to confusion, animosity, and uncertainty.

We often tell students to use their words to explain their feelings, but if we don’t give them the skills to understand perceptual misunderstandings, our advice falls on deaf ears.

For this reason, the four key skills for good communication provide a great place to start.

If we can reinforce these skills with continued practice with our learners, as well as model them as adults, we can come to a common understanding of what we mean together.

Design is communication. If we dissect the word, it is after all “de + SIGN” and is the backbone of logos, icons, brands, media, and more.

Resource Roundup: The Pencil Metaphor - The Point, Labor, And Fun

Source: ASIDE, 2014

We are down to the last few days before the Labor Day weekend signals the end of summer. All schools will be back in full swing next week, and summer Fridays will end for those lucky enough to have them in the work world.

For most educators, back-to-school decorations still include the proverbial apple, school bus, writing strips, and black and white composition notebooks. We definitely need a revamp in the bulletin board market to bring it into this century. We’ve yet to see tablets to add to the decor. That said, one of the most useful, iconic, and versatile images in education is the pencil.

Looking back, we wanted to round up some of our favorite resources that highlight the pencil as a metaphor for leadership, work, and fun.

The Pencil Metaphor graphic that has been reproduced in many places is a perfect place to start. It symbolically represents a continuum of where individuals might be on the learning curve of adapting new technology. The closer to the point, the more willing to take chances, lead, and share knowledge with others.

Source: Chief Technology Learning Center

I, Pencil: The Movie could not be better suited for the holiday weekend. It’s a symphony of human activity at work to produce one of the most basic tools used to record information, draft ideas, and doodle creations. It represents the interconnectedness of labor in the same way the pencil connects with learning.




Lastly, #Pencilchat had to be the one of the best viral chats on Twitter in 2011. It was friendly and a real mix of clever ideas, but at the same time a pointed discussion about technology integration with the coming onslaught of the tablet boom. We cannot help but revisit the hilarious video entitled Ode to #Pencilchat: Technology Integration in the Classroom.




Whether metaphor, symbol, or tool, the pencil is flexible, durable and timeless. We wish everyone a great school year.

We Love Our Devices, But Need To Look Up

Source: Matthew Cordell

It goes without saying that just like most of the students we teach, we are dependent on our devices. From our social media connections, blog feeds, and our constant desire to keep up with our PLNs, we have the same tendency to check for updates.

The picture book Hello, Hello, by Matthew Cordell, was a real eye-opener when we read it to our students this year. So many of them could relate to it. The main character, Lydia, tries to talk to her mom, but she’s on a laptop. Then she goes to her dad; he’s on his cell phone. Lastly, she tries to say hello to her brother, but he’s too busy on his tablet. So many kids commented, “That looks like my mom and dad.” For others it reminded them of their homes where everyone has electronics in their hands, and sometimes in the same room. No one is talking, and they're all staring down.

Source: Matthew Cordell

So what does Lydia do? She leaves the house and shouts hello to everything that crosses her path. Her journey climaxes with an imaginary stampede on the back of a horse. You sense she’s gone a long time and that no one missed her. In a nice twist, the horse stops short as her cell phone goes off, her parents wondering where she is. When she returns home, she gives them things she’s found. The family puts down their devices to go outside together. The message is clear.

As we approach the end of the school year, it’s important to encourage kids to take advantage of the world around them, the one moving in slower motion than a click, tap, or swipe. What better time than summer? We need to model it as adults, too, because they need to know it's okay to disconnect. We want them to take the time to interact personally with others, go outside to explore, or create something with their hands.  

Having time to develop an idea without interruption rarely happens today, but it is important that it does. Constant interruptions kill the flow of learning, the ability to focus, and the opportunity to get immersed in ideas. Like the book, Hello, Hello, the video "What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains" has the same message. It’s okay to unplug; everything will be there when we get back. There is a lot more than information on a screen. We just need to look up from our smart phones, tablets, and laptops to see it.


For more on how interruptions affect what we do, check out the post the "Secret to Creativity: Learning How to Say 'No'."

“Talk To Me” (TTM) at MoMA

Source: Talk To Me at MoMA

"Talk to Me: Design and Communication Between People and Objects" is a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Talk about digital consumerism, this is a feast for the visitor. It invites viewers to participate in every way, from apps to social media. The exhibition is designed to communicate with it, tweet about it, or capture QR codes on your smart phone for any object on display, thereby reinforcing how the interaction of people and objects pervades our everyday world. It emphasizes the differences in communication by the very nature of how it delivers the information. For example, some things speak, while others communicate in text or graphic interfaces that interact with us in either direct ways or subtly.

Source: The Wilderness Downtown

Some highlights from the exhibition include The Wilderness Downtown. This interactive website works best using Google Chrome. The design of this website allows a user to type in a street address using a drop down menu and click play. The site combines music with a hooded, running figure in a movie type setting that combines with Google maps to pan aerial and street views of that location. At the end, it lets you draw or type a postcard of “advice to the younger you that lived there then.” Fascinating and fun!

Source: TheyRule

Another piece on exhibit is an interactive station called They Rule. This is another website that allows users to create visualizations using interlocking directories of “some of the relationships of the U.S. ruling class” from the boards of the most powerful companies to individuals in corporations and government. Users can save a map of connections with annotations and links to share with others, such as the sample you see here. Hide & Seek also has a spot in the exhibition. It is a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. They believe "that play, as a theme, a way of being, and design tool, is integral to understanding how culture will develop in the 21st century." Check out its website for ideas, including the Board Game Remix Kit.

Understanding design and the role of the designer is key to the communication of information in the 21st century and how today’s students interact and learn. Viewing this exhibit and then thinking about how education has not changed much is a bit alarming. We block websites, teach to tests, and barely scratch the surface of Web 2.0 applications, and yet the design of communication continues to change at lightning speed. An underlining theme of the Talk to Me exhibition is that design is no longer static in the classical sense of “form follows function,” and "it is also not enough simply to ascribe meaning.”

Today, design must be dynamic, interactive, animate, and communicate in ways not available a decade ago. It is key as we move through the next century and should be a part of every teacher’s tool kit. We need to integrate it into all types of curricula, and by doing so, we will simultaneously broaden our integration of technology in a seamless way. This exhibit is a clear example of how design is not just considered an aesthetic, but instead it is a process of taking a concept from its formative state to its final outcome. Engaging students to envision an idea and communicate that through design will enable them to develop and create new ways of seeing. Not only can thinking like a designer transform the way children learn, but also it will cultivate their creativity. And, without a doubt, creativity is the underpinning of inspiration, imagination, and innovation.

Designing Information: The Need For Graphicacy

There is a burgeoning need to categorize and reshape today's information in innovative, recognizable, image-based ways. Now, with the onslaught of visual stimuli, from the Internet to infographics, there is a need to represent pictorially the multi-dimensional world of 3D and 4G information. From an educational standpoint, this means designing complex information for a range of learners. The manipulation of data through the use of images is crucial to understanding facets of meaning.

ASIDE 2011

Graphicacy represents an emerging literacy joining mathematical, textual, media, technological, and financial proficiencies. It moves beyond just being "visually literate" and instead combines mathematics, statistical analysis, geographic interpretation, and graphic design. Graphicacy is the ability to analyze and interpret information in a graphical form. It delineates clear, achievable skills that encapsulate the necessary benchmarks for today's children and tomorrow's professionals. Essentially, teachers must design information for educational use and also help their students decode the visual galaxy that encompasses their current world.

The crucial skill of graphicacy is vital to sustaining the relevance of a school's curriculum and also to sustaining the prominence of school graduates in a competitive marketplace. Students must be graphically literate to be informed, as they slice data, images, and words into layers of information and construct relational meanings. Graphicacy education, like literacy, oracy, and numeracy, completes the lines of communication necessary for learners in the 21^st century.

Resources:
The Emergence of Graphicacy by Poracsky, Young, Patton
Graphicacy: The Third Skill by Spielman
Graphicacy as a Form of Communication by Wilmot

Visual Immediacy

Regardless of medium or era, education has always been the act of offering information for acquisition. “Learning” is the individual process, where one internalizes new concepts or skills. “Education,” though, is the active delivery – the technique of shaping and structuring ideas by an instructor so they are assumed readily and permanently by a student.

The two most obvious changes in educational delivery over the past 15 years have been the visual representation and immediacy of information.

Communication has advanced along an accelerating continuum from the town crier to the printing press to the telephone, radio, television, and Internet. The change in fact-finding, however, is different from simple communication.

The New Bloom's Taxonomy - Author: Samantha Penney

Information channeling today is other-dimensional compared to the patterned practice of 20 years ago. In 1990, when a student needed to write a report on penguins or General Motors, he or she was dutifully dropped off at the library by a parent and picked up eight hours later with a folder of Xeroxes and microfiche printouts. Today the rapid and overwhelming access to information leads to a host of questions regarding accuracy, propriety, and property. Also, these facts and opinions are typically encountered on the visual screen.

Howard Gardner’s learning styles seem somewhat quaint today now that every child is a visual learner. An updated system should be called “Visual+”, meaning “visual” and then some other intelligence. From infancy, kids are babysat by televisions. They absorb fairy tales from picture books and point to themselves in their own digital photographs. As teachers, we, too, rely on the immediate, pictorial nature of facts when we need to find a quick historical photograph in Wikimedia or search directions on Google Maps or snap a QR code with our smartphones.

We try to remember that if we as teachers aren't using something anymore, it seems strange to make our students use it -- just because "we did it when we were their age."