Publish at January 24 2011 Updated October 05 2023
I'm sure you've found yourself writing a long, complex e-mail, only to stop in midstream and say to yourself: "Okay, I'll just call him, it'll be easier".
Because written words can't convey everything: complex situations involving many elements simultaneously, violent and sometimes contradictory emotions, nuances... Or rather, they could, if we were better writers, and if our readers had the patience to read us carefully to the end.
Faced with this limitation, there are two solutions: first, oral. What is difficult to explain in writing is easier to explain orally. The whole non-verbal dimension allows you to express what you don't say, and the flexibility of oral expression allows you to take shortcuts, backtrack, and use elipses, guided by the listener's reactions. Provided you listen, of course.
Then there's the image. We say it again and again, until we're sick of it: a picture is worth a thousand words! So make way for diagrams, maps and humorous illustrations. The cartoons of our favorite humorists, featured on the front pages of major national dailies, say much more, and much more quickly, about the hot topics of the day than the in-depth articles that many readers give up on reading in extenso. They strike the mind with their caricatured, mocking dimension, denoting a much-appreciated crossing of boundaries.
Computer graphics take advantage of our growing taste for images as people in a hurry. This is also the case for the "in plain English" videos, now translated into several languages, which simply explain the key concepts and tools of Web 2.0. These videos show that text and image complement each other and are interdependent in the explanatory mechanism.
We see the same phenomenon at work in these excellent world stereotype maps. Here, the text gives the image its full flavor, much more so than the colors assigned to the various countries. It's a pity these maps are only available in English... for the moment, but with a few words and a solid dictionary, you'll have a great time!
The geographical map is a powerful metaphor, but there are some maps that are like "metaphors squared": they borrow from a geographical shape that is itself a metaphor for a dream country... Such is the case with this famous map of the comparative influence of social networks in relation to the number of subscribers (see opposite), created by the Flowtown agency. This map is directly inspired by the Lord of the Rings map, as Yann Leroux wisely points out. A certain contemporary culture is at work here, but not possessing it doesn't prevent us from accessing the first level of reading the map of social networks, namely their comparative "surface" in the Web world.
What does all this have to do with education, where abstract writing and austere diagrams and maps reign supreme? An obvious connection. It seems... that our students are losing their concentration(although opinion is divided on the matter). They seem to be spending less and less time reading and more time watching videos on the Internet. It seems... that we now need to get them to draw diagrams and mind maps, so that they can express their creativity and represent the complexity of things in their own way.
Hence the vogue for mind maps, which have many advantages but are not as easy to implement as they might seem at first glance. This is clearly demonstrated in this Profetic dossier, which, while highlighting the quality of learning acquired through the use of this tool (meaningful learning, help in structuring knowledge, a tool that encourages reflective thinking...) also indicates that students have difficulty qualifying the relationships between concepts and knowledge. This is indeed the most complex stage, requiring a vocabulary that is at once rich, precise and abstract. Even more,"These difficulties are due to the fact that although we usually perceive relationships, we don 't necessarily conceptualize them , unless forced to do so by the situation or task".
This, then, is the hard point on which we stumble, once we're past the immediate understanding of graphical representation and the descriptive level. Optimal use of graphic representation, whether for production or reading, requires a serious apprenticeship in conceptualization,"an education in representation, visual analysis and graphic synthesis, from which our practices and our education are taking us further and further away", says Hubert Guillaud in an article entitled Où est passé la puissance de la pensée visuelle ?
Are our practices and our education really "increasingly" distancing us from this learning? Clearly, image education is not on the agenda, except perhaps in its artistic dimension, in school curricula. So it's up to us to educate ourselves, and a list of resources like this one won't be useless, even if we'd like to see the graphic arts better represented and resources for graphic creation included too.
Mapping Stereotypes - The geography of prejudice. Alphadesigner.com
A good example of the metaphorization of digiborigenes. Psy et Geek, Yann Leroux, August 7, 2010
Knowledge map construction software: tools for learning. Dossier technopédagogique, Profetic
Where has the power of visual thinking gone? Hubert Guillaud, Internet Actu, October 23, 2010
Sites for image education. Sur l'image.
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