Assignment

Say Hello to Your Digital Natives: Info Grazers & Idea Pickers

Assignment's
Key Concepts:

1. Text media produced for the new literacy of digital natives require visual space, visual progression and visual differentiation.

2. Infographics are essential components of today's text media.

The following videos take you deep inside the workings of visual space, visual progression, and visual differentiation as you analyze a magazine article to discover the new literacy in action.

Dropbox Submission
Please submit the following assignment to this unit's dropbox. You may combine both parts into a single document, or submit the parts separately.

Part 1: Using the principles of Visual SPD, redesign the first page of any work-related document that you have written in the past. You may submit this document in any format you wish: .doc, .docx, .rtf, .pdf, .html, .jpg, etc. Please include the "before" version. Please add at least one image to this document. Here is a video that shows how to add and manipulate images in Microsoft Word: Using Illustrations Effectively.

Part 2: Add a second page to your document that contains at least one infographic of any type. Here are some options for designing infographics, but feel free to use any graphing engine or other software you wish.

Infographic Option: PowerPoint 2007. There is a variety of tools you can use to produce infographics such as charts, which can in turn be used in your videos, text documents, or html documents. Some users are unaware of PPT's extensive graphics capabilities and seamless interface with Excel. Also, a major innovation to Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 is the addition of SmartArt, a group of more than 80 information graphics that can communicate faster and more clearly than words alone. Here is a short training course in using them: Microsoft Office 2007 SmartArt Graphics.

Here are two links to tutorials also on PowerPoint 2007's chart engine: Insert Charts and Format Charts.

Finally, the following links provide tutorials on using the graphing function of Microsoft Excel: MicroSoft Excel 2007 Tutorial for Creating Charts. (If you are still using Office 2003, a list of tutorials for that program is here.)

Infographic Option: NCES Graph Wizard. Not into MS Office? Nada problem. Here is a link to a great graph wizard. Create your graph, save an a .jpg or .gif, then insert it into any document or video editing timeline: National Council of Education Statistics.

N.B.: Although PowerPoint 2010 is available, this "new" product is inferior in several important ways to the breakthrough 2007 version. If you have 2010 PPT and wish to use it, that's fine.

To help you complete this assignment, below are "before" and "after" examples. The document on the left represents what is most often produced by academic writers who have not been introduced to chunking and document design techniques. On the right is the same document with some visual SPD elements applied to it.

If you ask the untrained reader which document they prefer or which document is easier to read, the most common answer will be the one on the right with visual SPD applied. No surprise there. If you ask the untrained reader why one was easier to read, you will normally get an answer like, "Well, I don't know. It just was. I like lists and pictures." The point is: Writers who understand the new visual literacy and know how to use visual SPD enjoy an advantage with readers that other wrtiers who do not. Below the thumbnails is an instructional video on how to transform the before into the after.


Click on image to open document