Applying Theory

Writes Stanford education professor Thomas Rohlen, "Our schools need to teach learning processes that better fit the way our work is evolving." The direction in which our work is evolving is toward distance collaboration and work in many-person teams. This is true in academia and professional companies alike. In order to collaborate effectively over distance, collaborators must be skilled at representing themselves visually.

Langer and Brown endorse challenging students to create their own mental models as a valuable learning tool. VizAbility fulfills this goal as well. Students are challenged to interpret symbols and create symbols themselves, to create stories to explain arrangements of pictures.

Lepper and Malone suggest that if motivational embellishments (bells and whistles) are used in educational software, they should not deter from the software's instructional goals. VizAbility's use of motivational embellishments complies with Lepper and Malone's suggestion. The multimedia used in VizAbility reinforces educational goals of the product by giving users an opportunity to experience visual thinking through many different mediums. For example, the use of video clips brings users into the environment of visual thinking by letting them watch other professionals speak about the ways they use visual thinking skills in their daily jobs. At no time does VizAbility use multimedia to compete with instructional goals. Lepper and Malone, however, also suggest that computer-based education should provide varying levels of challenges for users such that users initially have a rich schedule of success. As users become more advanced, success should only occur when the user has mastered a level of expertise and the user should not be promoted until he or she has done so. VizAbility does not comply with this suggestion. Users are able to move around the various games and exercises and explore all levels of difficulty. There are no mechanism within Vizability to help users achieve high levels of success at early stages in the software, and nor are there mechanisms to prevent users from being promoted to higher levels of difficulty without first completing lower levels.

According to Nathan B. Winters, most of the general population is at a fourth grade visual literacy level. With this mind, it is only more disquieting to realize how important visual literacy is to the development of oral and written literacy. Richard Sinatra has created a vivid representation of visual literacy's primacy. During the ontogeny of an individual, visual literacy is the first to develop. Later oral literacy develops using visual literacy as a means of associating objects and abstract ideas with words. Finally written literacy develops, which uses the oral literacy as well as visual literacy to help individuals construct new descriptions of objects and ideas.