Visual Culture in Educational Environment and Innovative Teaching Technologies

摘要

Modern social environment is characterized by dramatic growth of information flows that are required to be processed to keep pace with the development of science and education. The information flows increase so rapidly that they are getting harder and harder to process using traditional methods. Visual thinking is a new way to deal with "the image of the world" not divided into separate ideas, but with holistic visual images created via visual thinking and visual operations. The goal of visualization in education is to transform huge volumes of data into graphic images easy for perception and memorizing. Visual images can range from detail graphic representations to abstract schemes and mind maps. Visual reality is presented as information constructs subject to "reading" and interpretation as much as any verbal text. Visual reality is not considered as of secondary importance in culture and education; it combines thinking and imagination thus creating semantic images unique in their cognitive potentials and in quality of multilevel information coded in them. After different teaching technologies are compared, it is concluded that visual ways of information representation are more effective because of their structured and systematized form that makes it easy to teach and learn. Such structures are kept in long-term memory and easily reached if necessary, thus contributing to memorizing a lot of information.