Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE, Information Literacy, and ELI Web Seminars

Today’s youth are visually stimulated, but hardly literate, in engaging in a vocabulary of design and the language of images. To educate and engage this new breed of learners, institutions of higher education are revisiting and revising the basic tenets of a general education by asking, What does it mean to be literate in today’s visually saturated society?

Please Note: Due to technical difficulties, the audio archive begins while the session is in progress

Information literacy has been a key focus for many academic library programs for over 30 years. Today, information literacy is being revisited as an institutional imperative. This Web seminar will explore the forces leading to this renewed interest as well as the basic concepts of information literacy and key elements of successful programs. It will also answer the question of whose role it is to design and deliver an information literacy program.

EDUCAUSE Vice President Diana Oblinger will moderate Ron Bleed's Web Seminar, "Visual Literacy in Higher Education," which is also the title of his recent ELI Explorations paper (please see the "Explore Emerging Issues" section of the ELI Community Exchange). In the paper, Bleed describes the emerging challenge of understanding and promoting visual literacy:

Today's environment is highly visual—television, Web sites, video, and images dominate our lives—and visuals created with new technologies are changing what it means to be literate. The literacy of the 21st century will increasingly rely not only on text and words but also on digital images and sounds. This paper explores the emergence of visual literacy, which will become as important as textual literacy for learning, and the need to integrate it into the curriculum at colleges and universities.

During his Web Seminar, Bleed will explore the concept of visual literacy in greater depth, highlight its emergence as a topic of importance in higher education, and discuss its implications for the future of teaching and learning.