Introducing Infographics - Make It About Them

Source: ASIDE, 2012

Yes, infographics make excellent tools to use in the classroom to help students understand complex information in a graphically appealing way, and yes, it would be great to have them create their own to reflect what they are learning. So, where do you start if you want to introduce infographics, and how do you explain what they are to your students? Perhaps a tougher question is: what can you use to design them that would help explain how images and data come together to portray information visually? Simple, have students make a graphic about themselves using IONZ.

On the IONZ website, make sure the students click the British flag in the top right corner for the English version. From there, it’s easy. Each student fills in the name field (first name only is fine) and then clicks the forward arrow. The student selects items to create a customized visualization based on key categories, including gender, means of transportation, favorite food and animal, number of e-mail accounts, way of messaging, use of social networking, and hours spent online and sleeping.

Source: IONZ

All categories must have an answer to complete the infographic. In some cases, we did have students who did not use any social networking websites. In those cases, we asked them to choose one to continue. This website makes it amusing to pick selections by having each of the small icons move as the mouse rolls over them. It also provides the percentage of that choice immediately before moving onto the next item. Kids will definitely have fun with it.

Source: ASIDE, 2012

At the end of the selection process, when the personal infographic is finished, IONZ provides a few options for customization, such as the background color, page orientation, and highlight color for the individual’s choices. Students can import a picture as part of the personalization and add a small typed message to appear just below their name as well. Lastly, it can be saved as a JPEG to use later.

Use the results of the completed visualizations to make comparisons. Students can compare their individual results with other classmates or with users who participate on IONZ. In addition, a host of math lessons based on percentages, averages, and ratios could be derived from this data. The bottom line is, once students understand how to look at themselves as an infographic, they can look at others to decode what they see.

For further information on designing your own visualizations, please check the infographics and resources pages on this blog.

Graphicacy: Deciphering The Code

We try to remind ourselves that even though our students are bombarded with visual stimuli, they don’t always grasp how to parse the incoming images. We’ve cautioned before against assuming that students can intuitively “read” pictures and graphics.

If graphicacy refers to the roster of skills necessary to comprehend optical inputs, then we can communicate these skills by teaching the decoding and encoding of visual data. For us, decoding means judging, evaluating, challenging, or knowing the message underlying a cartoon, chart, or corporate brand. Encoding, on the other hand, is often the overlooked sibling in education. Encoding in many ways is the truer test of internalization, because it involves the ability to produce unique representations that reveal the layered skills of graphicacy. For us, encoding means creating, drawing, writing, or designing original and meaningful graphics.

Balchin and Coleman (1965) first introduced the term graphicacy to refer mostly to geography education. They meant to emphasize a spatial understanding that could not be conveyed solely by words or numbers. In his noteworthy paper, “Graphicacy As A Form Of Communication,” P.D. Wilmot (1999) of South Africa’s Rhodes University builds on Balchin’s, Coleman’s, and other scholars’ work to argue that an inclusive curriculum in graphicacy must be added to national standards.

Wilmot posits that graphicacy is equal to other literacies of oracy, literacy, and numeracy. Everyday encounters with pictorial representations, such as infographics, matrices, maps, logos, diagrams, word clouds, and icons, all require a “symbolic language” to translate ideas about “spatial relationships.” (p. 91)

Wilmot explains that specific mental skills are necessary to understand (decode) and to create (encode) graphic items. As he notes, “because perception involves both a physical process of ‘seeing’ and an intellectual one of interpreting, it is bound up with the development of cognitive skills.” (p. 93)

Most interesting in Wilmot’s thesis is that in scrutinizing early papers about information saturation (Fry, Gillespie, Glasgow, Van Harmelen & Boltt), he in many ways presages the modern harbingers of information overload (Palfrey & Gasser, Gleick, Weskamp, ASIDE). If the verdict is in about visual strain, then we genuinely “can no longer afford to neglect graphicacy as a form of communication.” (p. 92)