Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE and Information Literacy and Fluency

As international culture and commerce become increasingly reliant on visual communications, visual literacy has developed into an essential skill for 21st-century college graduates. With advancements in technology and the digitizing of information, digital literacy has also grown in importance. Digital visual literacy (DVL) is the ability to critically analyze digital visual materials, create effective visual communications, and make judgments and decisions using visual representations of thoughts and ideas. These skills, which actively engage our cognitive processing of visual images, have evolved from concepts at the intersection of a range of established disciplines. This session will discuss this exciting new literacy, showcase the free materials developed under a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education grant, and share recent feedback from instructors who have integrated these pioneering instructional modules into their courses. The discussion will benefit faculty, staff, and administrators infusing their curriculum with fresh IT skills.

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.