What I learned from Ohler

Dr. Jason Ohler spoke at the CUEBC Horizons conference. As expected, he was inspiring with his work with digital stories, but what surprised me was not what I gained in terms of motivation to get students and teachers using digital stories, but rather what I learned about visual literacy.

In fact, Ohler has really moved beyond speaking about visual literacy perhaps because in today’s context, literacy has to include visual literacy. He clearly defined literacy as being able to both consume and produce, considering not just text, but also form and colour. He talked about moving from words to collage, about the importance of moving from text centricism to new media collage; the value of learning to interpret and create web writing which is visually different text. He emphasized Art as the essential fourth R because it is part of literacy in our medial rich world. Multi media, he argued is the www esperanto, an intriguing concept. While he outlined nine essential guidelines for digital literacy, what struck me is that this kind of writing is different. It needs to be different. Even I read differently on the web. So my goal is to start finding ways to make my writing more visual. For someone like me who has truly denied my artistic abilities, this will be a challenge…. but something to work on.

Comments are closed.