This chapter examines how new visual literacies allow students to create meaning and develop competencies needed for the 21st century. Today’s generation is continually exposed to visual and digital media. Through empirical work, this chapter highlights how emerging visual technologies such as big data, infographics, digital badges, electronic portfolios (ePortfolios), visual social media, and augmented reality are facilitating the development of technology-related skills required for students in academics and in the workforce. Each visual technology platform will be examined for their usefulness in promoting engagement, subject-matter knowledge, and collaborative learning outside the traditional classroom approach.
The twenty-first century hosts a well-established global economy, where leaders are required to have increasingly complex skills that include creativity, innovation, vision, relatability, critical thinking and well-honed communications methods. The experience gained by learning to be visually literate includes the ability to see, observe, analyze, describe and interpret-leading to honing critical thinking skills, visual communications, problem-solving and the ability to articulate your thoughts both verbally and visually. This qualitative research explores the potential benefits to leaders in being visually literate.
This case study presents a cocurricular initiative at the Margery Somers Foster Center at Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick, NJ. The initiative resulted in an interview workshop for the course Knowledge and Power, a “mission course” of the Douglass Residential College. This discussion-based workshop uses visual and multimedia resources to teach useful skills for conducting meaningful interviews, develops deeper understanding of an interview as a two-way social interaction composed of listening and talking, cultivates ethnographic and cultural sensitivity, and empowers students to critically engage with visual forms of communication and the meanings of media.