Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean interrogates conventional notions of writing. The contributors—whose disciplines include anthropology, art history, education, film, history, linguistics, literature, performance studies, philosophy, sociology, translation, and visual arts—examine the complex interplay between language/literature/arts and the visual and virtual domains of expressive culture. The twenty-five essays explore various patterns of writing practices arising from contemporary and historical forces that have impacted the literatures and cultures of Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Martinique, Morocco, Niger, Reunion Island, and Senegal. Special attention is paid to how scripts, though appearing to be merely decorative in function, are often used by artists and performers in the production of material and non-material culture to tell “stories” of great significance, co-mingling words and images in a way that leads to a creative synthesis that links the local and the global, the “classical” and the “popular” in new ways

2014 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice "What’s going on in this picture?" With this one question and a carefully chosen work of art, teachers can start their students down a path toward deeper learning and other skills now encouraged by the Common Core State Standards. The Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) teaching method has been successfully implemented in schools, districts, and cultural institutions nationwide, including bilingual schools in California, West Orange Public Schools in New Jersey, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It provides for open-ended yet highly structured discussions of visual art, and significantly increases students’ critical thinking, language, and literacy skills along the way. Philip Yenawine, former education director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and cocreator of the VTS curriculum, writes engagingly about his years of experience with elementary school students in the classroom. He reveals how VTS was developed and demonstrates how teachers are using art—as well as poems, primary documents, and other visual artifacts—to increase a variety of skills, including writing, listening, and speaking, across a range of subjects. The book shows how VTS can be easily and effectively integrated into elementary classroom lessons in just ten hours of a school year to create learner-centered environments where students at all levels are involved in rich, absorbing discussions.

An overview of the art historical antecedents to virtual reality and the impact of virtual reality on contemporary conceptions of art. Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book, Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art, interface design, agents, telepresence, and image evolution. Grau retells art history as media history, helping us to understand the phenomenon of virtual reality beyond the hype. Grau shows how each epoch used the technical means available to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces, and panoramas, which were the most developed form of illusion achieved through traditional methods of painting and the mass image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of perhaps the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's 1883 The Battle of Sedan, Grau shows how immersion produced emotional responses. He traces immersive cinema through Cinerama, Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax and IMAX, and the head mounted display with its military origins. He also examines those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from earlier forms of illusionary art. His analysis draws on the work of contemporary artists and groups ART+COM, Maurice Benayoun, Charlotte Davies, Monika Fleischmann, Ken Goldberg, Agnes Hegedues, Eduardo Kac, Knowbotic Research, Laurent Mignonneau, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey Shaw, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer, and Wolfgang Strauss. Grau offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a theoretical framework for analyzing its phenomenologies, functions, and strategies throughout history and into the future.

The author describes ways to employ the visual arts in the writing workshop with reasons to do it, guides for trying it, images, and worksheets.

Teaching models that focus on blended and virtual learning have become important during the past year and have become integral for the continuance of learning. The i²Flex classroom model, a variation of blended learning, allows non-interactive teaching activities to take place without teachers’ direct involvement, freeing up time for more meaningful teacher-student and student-student interactions. There is evidence that i²Flex leads to increased student engagement and motivation as well as better exploitation of teachers’ and classroom time leading to the development of higher order cognitive skills as well as study skills for students' future needs related to citizenship, college, and careers. The Handbook of Research on K-12 Blended and Virtual Learning Through the i²Flex Classroom Model focuses not only on how to design, deliver, and evaluate courses, but also on how to assess teacher performance in a blended i2Flex way at the K12 level. The book will discuss the implementation of the i²Flex (isquareFlex), a non-traditional learning methodology, which integrates internet-based delivery of content and instruction with faculty-guided, student-independent learning in combination with face-to-face classroom instruction aiming at developing higher order cognitive skills within a flexible learning design framework. While highlighting new methods for improving the classroom and learning experience in addition to preparing students for higher education and careers, this publication is an essential reference source for pre-service and in-service teachers, researchers, administrators, educational technology developers, and students interested in how the i2Flex model was implemented in classrooms and the effects of this learning model.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Visual Informatics Conference, IVIC 2009, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in November 2009. The 82 revised research papers presented together with four invited keynote papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 216 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on virtual technologies and systems, virtual environment, visualization, engineering and simulation, as well as visual culture, services and society.

"As a writing teacher for twenty-some years, I wish I′d had access to this material." -Marilee Sprenger, Educational Consultant Seattle Pacific University "Helps teachers see how to approach writing in ways that make it fresh, relevant, and accessible." -Carol Ann Tomlinson, Professor of Educational Leadership University of Virginia "True to one of the basic tenets of writing, the book shows rather than tells . . . . This makes for a fun and engaging read." -Erin Sullivan, Research Associate University of Connecticut Are your picture-smart, music-smart, and body-smart learners lagging behind their word-smart and number-smart peers? Donovan Walling offers innovative new ways to help these learners become effective writers! With an emphasis on matching teaching method to learning style and developing both basic writing competencies and higher-level thinking skills, this resource offers instructional strategies, sample lessons, and pathways to fluency that focus on Organizing ideas "artistically" Using walkabout strategies to clarify concepts Using pattern and rhythm for writing sense, and much more Twelve sample lessons and a learning styles self-assessment make this an essential resource for teachers, literacy coaches, and curriculum designers who want to expand writing curriculum and incorporate more non-linear methods into their instructional repertoires.

This forward-thinking collection brings together over sixty essays that invoke images to summon, interpret, and argue with visual studies and its neighboring fields such as art history, media studies, visual anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, and aesthetics. The product of a multi-year collaboration between graduate students from around the world, spearheaded by James Elkins, this one-of-a-kind anthology is a truly international, interdisciplinary point of entry into cutting-edge visual studies research. The book is fluid in relation to disciplines; it is frequently inventive in relation to guiding theories; it is unpredictable in its allegiance and interest in the past of the discipline—reflecting the ongoing growth of visual studies.

Visualization, Visual Analytics and Virtual Reality in Medicine: State-of-the-art Techniques and Applications describes important techniques and applications that show an understanding of actual user needs as well as technological possibilities. The book includes user research, for example, task and requirement analysis, visualization design and algorithmic ideas without going into the details of implementation. This reference will be suitable for researchers and students in visualization and visual analytics in medicine and healthcare, medical image analysis scientists and biomedical engineers in general. Visualization and visual analytics have become prevalent in public health and clinical medicine, medical flow visualization, multimodal medical visualization and virtual reality in medical education and rehabilitation. Relevant applications now include digital pathology, virtual anatomy and computer-assisted radiation treatment planning. - Combines visualization, virtual reality and analytics - Written by leading researchers in the field - Gives the latest state-of-the-art techniques and applications

This book offers a practical methodology for the design of virtual environments for an audience of engineers and researchers who need a more serious technical treatment of the subject than now exists. Each stage of the design process is described in detail. This book draws together vital information from all fields, providing both the theoretical and the practical knowledge needed to design VR systems that will solve real-world problems.