Week Two Reading Images Represented participant vs Interactive participant

I was excited to order Reading Images,The Grammar of Visual Design by: Kress and van Leeuwen. I have spent the last twenty-five years of my life in the art and design worlds. I studied art and architecture history and had close friends who were artists and art therapists. They introduced me to Rudolf Arneheim and his work image and meaning and other writers and ideas about reading art and images. As teacher, I encourage my students to express their ideas through the use effective drawings. I teach them Visual Literacy. I talk to them about line types and how lines evoke different readings. I teach them that image composition and directions of display tell stories and engages viewers. I want them to learn how to “read” buildings. I am looking forward to document these ideas and have them to my students in the future. My understanding had been based on experience and instinct, so to get these ideas in a book was important to me.

When the book arrived, I judged by its cover! I thought a book on visual grammar needed to have much stronger images on the cover that have universal meaning (i.e. art works from ancient cultures or drawings by Picasso) or have been produced by a graphic artist who has mastered the grammar of art and design.
I am very interested of the ideas about image and signifier and that new understanding challenged my assumptions about meaning of visual signs. I thought that the visual language had a universal meaning but reading Chapter Two made me aware of how society and culture assign meaning to symbols and images and how the meanings change with time. I wonder if the meanings of images are becoming more universal due to the communication revolution and due to Google images.

Chapter One of the book was clear and made sense to me. When I started reading Chapter Two I felt so lost and I thought the basics of semiotics needed to be explained better so I looked it up on YouTube and Found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEgxTKUP_WI&index=1&list=PL73o0LtCCd_-3XUsalGLfe2JB-2UJqeSS

or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkp8dUWywor

this excellent lecture on graphics :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4b7qXbRHTM

Another problem I had with the book is that I found the authors rely heavily on contemporary Australian diagrams and ignore other cultures images and graphics. Also all graphics were in black and white. I am a big fan of Russian constructionist art and El Lissitzky’s constructivists picture “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge loses it effect with out color.

I thought changing “object” and “element” in art and image to “participants” made the concepts more confusing than they need to be. I understand that act of making image and reading the image are intertwined. To make things worse, the image on page 45 ( fig 2.1 the British used guns) was so small and very hard to read. It make the entire comparison and discussion on the value of abstraction hard to follow.

With advent of the internet and smart phone and digital screen everywhere. the Social meaning of images will probably become more universal. Emojis are on everyone's cell phone and that could be a unifying force for visual literacy.  

Week One: New Literacies, Khader's Reflections

I am very interested in how literacies are changing . I am a teacher and I advocate visual literacy and sometimes struggle with how little attention my students pay to drawings. Most of my students revert to the mode of drawing they had when they were in Kindergarten so they draw stick figures for the rest of their lives. When I worked as an architect I had same problem with clients who could not "read" architectural plans and were too embarrassed to admit their visual illiteracy.  I am glad that we are reading (Reading Images, the Grammar of Visual Design.  Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen)

 “The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives” (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).  Even though I read this article several times, I found it hard to understand exactly where the author was going. I was hoping for more concrete examples to illustrate his ideas.  As a heavy internet user and a technology and design teacher, I have spent plenty of time on social media, reading internet articles and few blogs. I would like to visit more blogs by young people and see what specific methods they use to format text. I see many examples of that on Facebook. What I see mostly on Facebook are stark images and a few evocative words that promote one idea or another. I noticed that with these memes that one cannot express more than three sentences, and many people "like " and "share." It seems to me that social media websites have too much information and to compete for attention, posts need to be very short and act like a billboard sign on a highway.

As a bilingual Arabic- and English-speaking person, I am also interested in  the relationship between new media, new literacy, and democracy. I was very excited about Arab Spring and how it could not have happened without New media. It is interesting to note that 27% of people in Egypt are considered illiterate. It is unfortunate that the Egypt experiment ended badly.
I found chapter five of ( Literacies Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives. Lankshear and Knobel)  enlightening. I think the discussion on the meaning of citizenship and literacy is relevant in every democracy. I am wondering if our US literacies are failing to produce engaged citizenry. I often ask my students up to high school, "What system of government  do we have? " and most often they don't know!

A few weeks ago, I saw this image on a friend's website and thought it was positive and worth sharing:  

Later that day, a few of my smart friends said "Are you sure that the pope said that?"

I then I used Snopes to fact-check and realized my post was not factual.

I realized then that impulse to share emotionally charged memes can be dangerous in the dissemination of  ideas.

I am a visual  learner and find much easier to understand complex ideas if they are supported by rich images and illustrations, but I still believe that traditional texts and time-honored storytelling are important foundation for deeper comprehension.

my first post

This is my first blog:

I will use this blog to participate in NEW MEDIA AND NEW LITERACIES Class discussion.

First below is my BIO:

Khader Humied was trained as an architect and has worked in NYC and Westchester and Rockland Counties during the last 12 years. He taught himself woodworking skills and began the adventure of furniture making. His special interest is designing buildings that are green and sustainable, simple and effective. For the last seven years he has been teaching architecture and design   to children and young adults. Helping Children understand the  to built environment and using his skills to inspire children to be connected to the design world around them.
He teaches college courses of Computer Aided Design. AutoCad and Sketch Up.

My Children Website:  www:wizlab.orgyou can see Khader's lighting fixtures here: http://www.metaformstudio.com/
you see architecture design here:  http://visualsimplicity.weebly.com/See my adult design class: http://sketchup106.weebly.com/