Well, this course definitely influenced my position on communication, literacy, and writing.
At its beginning, I asked a question in hopes to understand a popular university term “medium”. I first thought it stood for a part, a component. Now it seems to me that medium can mean a mode, a form, or a transition phase depending on the context.
According to Wikipedia, “infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly” (“Infographics,” n.d.). My first acquaintance with this approach happened before “Text Technologies”, when some worried parents of a Torontonian high schooler called and asked for my help with infographic. I googled the thing and together with those enthusiastic and a bit desperate people we created something to satisfy their high school teacher. So, it seems safe to say that infographic is quite popular in modern secondary schools.
Then I considered the technique funny, but later I changed my mind. Infographic can help a kid and an adult remember the important information better: to learn how to find the essential pieces of any text and make only them noticeable by changing their original mode of presentation.
Of course, it takes time to do that, and that is why it is advisable to use this method only with something truly valuable – thick classic books, for example, which brief content can be read in Wikipedia to save time and memorized in a short-term memory. But if this plot summary is changed into a sequence of pictures afterwards, a reader will not be able to forget the content any time soon.
After all, it works according to the laws of language acquisition which follow the laws of physics – the longer you manipulate the word (or the plot of a story), the better you remember it.
Besides literature, infographic might be good for history – to remember the events and their dates, for psychology, medicine, and even sports – anywhere where it is necessary to memorize the sequence of different actions.
As an English teacher for international students, I am thinking about using it for literature first of all. Not many English courses consist of this literature part, but something of a small genre can be easily inserted into a curriculum for reading purposes.
When it comes to literature, there is always a question of content – what to consider worth of studying?
Most of my international students come from India – motherland of Upanishads, Vedas and Ramayana. We can potentially give them best literary works of Western culture to deal with, but again, this stuff should not be too big lest it overloads the ESL curriculum.
I have been thinking about something truly Canadian and simple, to practice this mode-bending first. What if we have some narratives to work with? They can be described with 3-5 pictures from Internet and bring a lot of fun.
After this “creation” stage it is possible to make students work in pairs to try to understand the plot of the narrative – was there a happy end or a sad end? Who was the main hero of the story? Which problem was he trying to solve? Who helped him (if applicable).
Basically, this activity will teach them how to generalize a small story, ask and answer questions, and make predictions, but these techniques are also transferrable and appropriate for the bigger literary forms too.
To practice it, I remembered the author who wrote a lot about Canadian nature – Ernest Thompson Seton, a pioneer of animal fiction whose stories I adored in my childhood. This writer was born in Great Britain, raised in Canada, and spent the rest of his life in the States.
I tried to find his works online and was lucky to come across Fadepage.com where Seton’s book “Wild Animals I Have Known” (1898) was “in the public domain in Canada, and is made available to you DRM-free. You may do whatever you like with this book, but mostly we hope you will read it”. I sincerely liked those encouraging words and the book itself, and I am sure that students will appreciate those texts about Canada too in spite of them being written more than a hundred years ago.
Below there will be my infographic of “Domino” or “Biography of a Silver Fox” written by Seton in 1909 as an example. I used just 5 pictures found on Internet to introduce the story.
I am sorry that I cannot create a poster, Ernesto. I am not a designer and couldn’t become one in three months. I can copy pictures from Internet, save and edit them a bit. I am still not able to make up a really nice collage. But I am doing my best, and I am really proud of my UBC blog now that it became more colourful and, hopefully, thoughtful.
I am an educator instead, and I am going to try infographic with my ESL students in the different creative ways that I have already mentioned above:
1) Reading.
2) Generalization.
3) 3-5 key pictures.
4) Discussion / Guessing game / Writing an essay etc.
Infographic should not be overused though, not to lose its attraction. Again, it takes a lot of time, and it demands some editorial skills, but at the same time the technique is refreshing, good for relaxation and remembering something well. It is definitely worth a try!