Pictures of the 21st century

The definition from http://www.ncreLorg/engauge/skills/vislit.htm of visual literacy is “the ability to interpret, use, appreciate and create images and video using conventional and 21^st century media in a way that advance thinking, decision-making, communication and learning”. This means not only images of objects, but also images of ideas.

In the 21^st century learning, students live in and use an environment which is highly visual. Ron Bleed (http://educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI4001) emphasizes the importance of blogs, digital images and video in a world where literacy doesn't only refer to texts and words but also to digital imaging.

That leads me to the 6^th provocation:

What will (biology) students (from the 21^st century) want and need from me?

The visual aspect is particularly important when teaching cellular and molecular biology. We are dealing with a world invisible to the naked eye, which make it difficult to understand. In his article M. Flannery explores the importance of information visualization in Molecular biology and Genetics. 3D images of proteins are available to all on the Web http://www.ncbi.nih.gov. Software capable of converting enormous quantities of data into images on the Web or elsewhere using a downloadable programming environment (Visualizing Data from Ben Fry: http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/chromosomes/13-icp/) are used to visualize the human genome and represent all information known about chromosomes.

Students need to learn to use or at least to be aware of these kind of information-visualization. They are the technique of the future and they are the only way to analyze large amount of complex data.

The issue of using these kind of technologies in education is that mastering these technologies can be a quite difficult task for students as well as for the teachers. It raises questions of teacher's development as well as combining software education and biology into a curriculum with an already high content.

reference:

Flannery, M. Thinking in pictures. The American Biology Teacher, Vol 68, no 5, p299-303.