Timeline

Hello readers,

Here is my Visual Design Timeline.  I hope you enjoy looking at it more than I enjoyed making it!

If you click on the picture, it'll come up bigger so that you can see the details a bit better.

            The “ability to construct meaning from visual images” (Giorgis, Johnson, Bonomo, Colbert, & al, 1999: 146) is known as visual literacy.  Essentially, this skill refers to the ability to process information presented in a visual format or simply to “read a picture.”  As an educator, I see visual literacy playing its most obvious and important role in the classroom.  In order to help students learn, a teacher must present information through a variety of methods.  The most common of these methods is visually.  The first tool that was available for educators to help their students process information visually was a hornbook, which “ . . . was a flat board on which a sheet of paper printed with the alphabet, the Lord’s prayer, and several simple words were pasted” (McGrath, K., 777).  These “ . . .  appeared in Europe at the end of the 15^th century” (Anzovin, S. & J. Podell, 80).  The hornbook was followed by textbooks, the first of which was “. . .  published in 1658 . . . for teaching Latin . . . ” (Anzovin, S. & J. Podell, 81).    The globe revolutionized the teaching of geography, in years following “. . . 1810, [when] a Vermont farmer and copper engraver named James Wilson made the first American globes” (McGrath, K., 777).  A major improvement in visual instruction came with the invention of the blackboard or chalkboard, which “. . . was patented in 1823 by Samuel Read Hall of Concord, Vermont . . .” (McGrath, K., 777).  The 20^th Century saw numerous changes in the way in which teachers are able to present information as a visual to their students.  Among these was the use of films, which “. . . came into widespread classroom use in the 1940s and 1950s” (McGrath, K., 777).  The first commercial application of a copy machine “ . . . was the Model 914, introduced in 1950 by the Haloid Company of Rochester, NY” which changed its name to the Xerox Corporation years later (Anzovin, S. & J. Podell, 371).  Visual displays of materials further developed through the use of the overhead transparency projector, which premiered in the mid-1960s (Litas, C.); the LCD video projector, which was invented in 1984 (Gene Geldoff), but did not see widespread use until around the turn of the century; and the use of dry-erase or white boards, which “. . . did not begin to appear in business organizations until the mid-1980s” (About Blackboards); and the opaque overhead projector, which Hoo-Shik Kim received a patent for in 1996 (US Patent 4597207 – Overhead Projector).  While there have been far more inventions in the field of education that have improved student learning, these are amongst the most important applications of John Debes’ idea of visual literacy in the American school systems.