Visual Literacy Book Recommendations?

I am not a visual learner by nature but would like to improve my graphic design skills and create presentations that will appeal to visual learners. I have just been using public domain clip art and photographs in my Powerpoint presentations lately, which is more than I did two years ago, but know that there is room for improvement. I would like to become more sophisticated with graphical representation. I am planning on reading a few books by Edward R. Tufte over break --- Envisioning Information and Beautiful Evidence. Anyone out there have any other titles to suggest? Thanks in advance!

Audio quality in tutorials

I am happy to have finally finished my Moodle course, but know I need to go back re-record all the audiopresentations I recorded in Jing. I absolutely love Jing, it is such an easy, user-friendly product, but was unable to get it to work with my mic/headset! The only mic that would work with it was the mic that was embedded within my laptop, which has absolutely horrible sound.

When I used Captivate last summer, I had the exact opposite experience.... my laptop mic wouldn't work, so I had to purchase a headset at Radioshack to record my narration.

Captivate is a better program, since it will allow me to edit out my pauses and "ums and ahs", but it is much more difficult to publish, edit and and post Captivate files within Moodle.

I am still interested in Jing and will train my coworkers to use it next week. The learning curve is much faster for Jing and I think they will be more likely to use it to create fast follow-up screencasts for their face to face classes.

I just need to improve that sound quality....

The Media Engineer at work suggested that I try ordering "Snowball" microphones for the staff PCs. He says they are not too expensive ($100 each) and have excellent quality. I am going to try to see if I can get approval to buy them. I think improved sound quality will really enhance the class.

Copyright & Permissions

I've been really struggling at work lately with copyright & fair use. Library administration takes a very conservative view towards fair use and want the faculty to secure permissions from copyright holders before using materials in the classroom. Although the library is willing to do all the research and make contact with the copyright holders, and pay any royalties from our own budget, many professors resent waiting for this process.

I had some interesting and surprising results last week when seeking permissions for two faculty members.

Each person wanted to go to Blockbusters and rent a DVD to show to their classes. Professor A wanted to show "The Motorcycle Diaries", the Hollywood film about Che Guevara, to a communications class. Professor Z wanted to show "Street Fight", a documentary about the Newark NJ mayor election race, to his political science class. The library's policy is to discourage anyone from showing a rental or personal copy to a class. Instead, I offer to purchase the film for the professor and add it to the library collection.

Whenever I purchase the film, I have to also ask permission to have it shown in a college classroom. Usually, I expect to pay for this privilege from the library's budget.

To my great surprise, I bought "Motorcycle Diaries" from Barnes & Noble for $15.00 and was able to get permissions from Universal for a classroom only showing --- free of charge.

But "Street Fight" was a different story. I could buy the film for $25.00, directly from the filmmaker, Marshall Curry. But the restriction on Curry's website was that the film was for home use only. Purchases for "Educational Use" were directed to bullfrogfilms.com, which charged the library $295.00 for the same film!

Blogging & Gardner Intrapersonal intelligence

I've been spending most of my classwork time playing with other Web 2.0 toys & am enjoying learning Moodle, creating my first wiki and reading and responding to the bulletin board discussions. Although I am sad that we have been divided into two groups -- I think it is really interesting to read the posts of all classmates. So far, I haven't been able to attend either of the Wimba sessions for this course but have everything off of my schedule November 5th, so I am looking forward to finally hearing my classmates' voices.

Now for class content... I am thinking about Howard Gardner this week and musing over how to teach lessons that allow various learners to use their "natural" intelligences. Exciting new educational technology might challenge traditional pedagogy and allow online educators to put some of Gardner's ideas into practice.

I wrote a bit about Interpersonal intelligence in my post to the discussion board this week. I think that discussion boards, wikis, and meeting software like Wimba are superb tools for allowing Gardner's "interpersonally intelligent" learner to engage the content in a way that is productive for them.

But blogs seem to feel more like the personal diary/ journal where the author writes traditionally private reflections. Although I realize that blogs can be easily made "public", the writing style of most blogs that I've read (outside of this class) are personal and sometimes confessional. The material is similar to what I would find in a journal instead of a class discussion.

I think that a blog might be a good tool for the "intrapersonally intelligent" learner to wrestle with new content in an online class.

The intrapersonally intelligent learners, according to Gardner, are:
self-reflecting, know their strengths and limitations and are very aware of their own moods, motivations and intentions.

I think that the blog is the perfect online tool for these types of learners to reflect on their coursework....

Full Disclosure

or my life is an open book.

Three things that everyone who knows me knows about me.....

1. I am directionally impaired, frequently lost, and chronically late. (Do these count as three separate things or are the latter two merely subcategories of the first?)

2. I am a yoga junkie. I am much less pleasant to be around if I don't practice or go to class a few times a week.

3. I am Bookluster and a sucker for anything out of print in a fine binding. My house, office and car are overflowing, but I keep buying more.....