Bøker i Visual Learning-serien

The authors of the 6th volume of the series Visual Learning outline the topic of visuality in the 21st century in a trans- and interdisciplinary theoretical frame from philosophy through communication theory, rhetoric and linguistics to pedagogy.

Learning and teaching are faced with radically new challenges in today's rapidly changing world and its deeply transformed communicational environment. We are living in an era of images. This title is suitable for tertiary-level education.

This book raises the question of what visuality really is and how it is possible to explain it. The authors outline the topic of visuality and virtual reality in an interdisciplinary theoretical frame from philosophy through communication theory, rhetoric and linguistics to pedagogy.

Promoting visual learning is the educational task of today. Exploiting speech act theory in the domain of visuality is necessary for meeting that challenge. To teach with pictures and learn through pictures is a practical enterprise where thinking is embedded in doing. Postmodern or conservative, education has to face the problem of pictoriality.

After the iconic term and the invasion of digital images, videos and animations, learning environment, educational science, and everyday educational practice have to face a great challenge: to retain a certain conservatism and, at the same time, to exploit the potentials of online networked communication - the continuous word and image interplay.

Educational practice and theory in the 21st century are struggling with the abundance of digital images. In a culture that was for centuries predominantly verbal, images present a difficulty, but they must be recognized as a blessing rather than as a curse. Not only emotions but also abstract thought inevitably involve images, mental and physical.

With its unprecedented wealth of images and videos, the digital world poses a completely new challenge to the entire educational system, in particular to higher education. In what sense can we speak of a visual liberation, a visual homecoming? To what extent are images autonomous carriers of meaning, what does a logic of images amount to?