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Sunni Brown

Author, Speaker, Creative Director, sunnibrown.com

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Why is visual literacy discouraged in most cultures & WHAT CAN WE DO to change that?

This LIVE CONVERSATION will open at 1PM ET/ 10AM PT on Monday, October 31th! Join me!

Visual literacy, if described as the ability to communicate via doodling, drawing, and sketching or described as the ability to display complex information in visual language formats, is often a literacy missing in adults despite it being a universal and natural inclination in children. Why does it disappear? And more importantly, what can we do to alter this course?

**ADMIN UPDATE: Sunni Brown has asked to extend her Conversation for two weeks. She will be jumping in to catch up with responses over the next two weeks. Happy posting everyone!

Related Talks:
Topics: 21st Century Skills Live Conversation cognitive design doodling drawing information design sketching visual thinking
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  • Emmie Thomas

    • +1
    Oct 31 2011: About cost of illiteracy, I once read from a training journal that illiteracy costs U.S. businesses $60 billion a year in lost productivity. I can try to dig up the research if anyone is interested. Sunni, what you said about the ridicule of the use of visual language is very interesting. We haven't seen or heard of such before, so sharing references to this fact would be really instructive.

    I am wondering if the use of visual language is so often missing because the ability to illustrate our thoughts is a difficult skill to acquire, despite its tremendous learning value. When we illustrated pictures 1500 SAT words for our iphone apps (Knowji Vocab), it required an enormous amount of creativity, talent and time and the project took thousands of hours to put together. For instance, how would one go about drawing words like "abstract" or "conception"?

    • Maxine Atkins

      • 0
      Nov 13 2011: Hi Emmie, I am interested to find this app? It isn't coming up on iPhone, I also know a way how to illustrate the words, the reason is, if you cannot read at all, you find a way!

      • Emmie Thomas

        • 0
        Nov 14 2011: Hi Maxine: I would love to learn about your solution for illustrating words. Our apps can be found in the app store by searching for "Knowji Vocab". Or you can go to our site at www.knowji.com. My email is info@knowji.com and I hope to hear from you. Best, Emmie

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