Beyond the Five-Page Paper: Representing Student Learning Visually
As I look over the “visual learning” category here on the blog, I noticed that I haven’t posted slides from a presentation of mine on visual learning in quite a while. That changes today! I’m giving a talk at noon at the University of Iowa titled “Beyond the Five-Page Paper: Representing Student Learning Visually.” It combines two of my favorite topics: visual learning and “students as producers.” Thanks to Jean Florman at the UI Center for Teaching for inviting me. Also, thanks to my Vanderbilt colleague Nancy Chick, who helped develop an earlier version of this talk.
Below you’ll find the Prezi for my talk. You can click the forward button to move through the Prezi as I plan to present it. Or you can use your mouse to pan and zoom freely around the canvas. Any links you see are live, so feel free to follow them for more information.
Update: The session seemed to go very well, with lots of engagement by the faculty in the two activities I planned. In the first, participants looked at a sample infographic and started brainstorming a rubric for assessing that kind of student work. This gave them a chance to think about some of the ways visual thinking might be included in an assignment. For instance, the sample infographic used size to represent quantity in some areas (the bubbles on the world map) but not in other areas (the list of most shoplifted items). Then I shared the process I used to develop an infographic rubric in my stats course a couple of years ago, along with the rubric itself.
The second activity came at the end of the session, and it’s one I’ve used in past workshops on visual thinking: a visual minute paper. I handed out markers and large Post-It notes and asked participants to doodle their ideas for visual assignments in their classrooms. The results are a little hard to interpret, but still interesting I think:
Thanks to the faculty and staff at the University of Iowa who attended the session for their participation and ideas.