Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Visual Context
I think the most interesting aspect of Badger's piece is the reference of images to words. Who hasn't heard "A picture is worth a thousand words" before? The difference here is that we do not even need the words. What if we created a blog made up entirely of images? Examples given in the article such as Heather Champ's have visual dialogs, but they are always accompanied by the blogger's own text. What I think would be great would be to have nothing but images and to allow visitors to add their own text along side, but with no written input from the author of the blog. Though I can see where Badger makes a point with the negative sides of this issue, I can only see visual literacy as becoming more and more important, even for teachers. Not all students are great writers, but this does not mean they do not have ideas...
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5 comments:
FYI, there are image-only blogs. Try Light Infusion for starters, and Photoblogs is a pretty good resource for finding others (though many are just photo-centric and do include some text).
I would worry that the image-only blogs would just devolve into the next generation of "Bumper Stumpers." :)
Jake
There are photo only blogs out there as somone else has pointed out. The only concern I would have with creating a photo only blog with students would be that, well, I'm an ENGLISH teacher -- I want them to write. Using the images in conjunction with text is a great way to get them to write, but I can't see bypassing the written word.
I'll add that I think using a photo only blog would be a great research project in visual rhetoric. Can you say, thesis?
It would be interesting to see whether or not the images posted by the "authors" communicate the intended messages to the targeted audiences. Here's another question to debate. Can we define visual bloggers as authors?
What we're dealing with, as we move towardsa more visual literacy, is an exhcnage in the relaitonship of value between images and words. The phrase we've been throwing around (a piciture is worth a thousand words) sets the value of an image int eh cotnext of words, and we're witinissing a reversal of that-- regardless of how much WE love to read and write, the moment will come, in some (specific but spreading) contexts, when we need to justify the use or value of text.
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