What role can imagery play in blogging?

By Willy Kjellstrom
I am an avid supporter of using imagery to uncover unique approaches to literacy, understanding, and conversation. Jerome Harste and Phyllis Whitten, two pioneers in this field, offer some unique approaches that I believe fit (or could fit) into weblogging. One of these ideas is sketch-to-stretch.

Sketch-to-Stretch (STS) asks readers to draw pictures that represent an understanding of key ideas in texts. It is an entirely abstract process that is NOT drawing a scene from a book. It involves looking at color, shapes, and objects as metaphors that naturally promote conversation and interpretation. I believe that photographs could work as well as personally drawn images.

What would this look like in a blog? How does this fit into education? What if students clipped a blog or article into their personal weblog. Students could then search flickr for photographs that they felt were metaphors for a key idea in the clipped article and insert it into the post. The critical aspect of doing this would be the comments (or conversation) that came from visitors reading and offering their personal interpretation of the connection between the publisher's picture and clip.

Could this work? I don't know. I would like to try it... I will in my next post.
 

2 comments so far.

  1. Anonymous 9:41 PM
    Technology is analagous to the airplane. Some people get very excited about being 'engineers', designing the architecture of things, the tools. However, what you and David are interested in is where can that technology/ariplane take you. It is not an end in and of itself. The fact that the airplane is headed 'up and above' means moving to higher planes, to the expanse, to the uncharted ground.

    A light is something that can be used to shine and show where one has been; however, it is most meaningful to illuminate the unknown path ahead. Where can these tools take us, and most importantly, how high can we go?
  2. I like how you extrapolated height from the picture of the plane. I was not thinking about height, but, yes, you are correct about my belief in technology and its ability to promote new, higher-level thinking skills.

Something to say?