To start off this blog post, I will attempt to summarize what the article was trying to say, from what I can tell. I am incredibly dyslexic, so I read the article by highlighting the text and using my Mac's "Speak" function and listening to it like an audio book. This gets a little sketchy when there are references and citations and things like that because if a string of characters doesn't form a word, the computer will read every character individually, making it a little difficult to understand, but I will do my best.
The article first goes over the various definitions of visual literacy, as listed in other texts by other authors. Avgerinou then goes on to list qualities that students should have going through school and into adulthood, and she relates this to comparative skills that fall under visual literacy. Then she makes the point that since our world is becoming oversaturated with images, it is becoming more and more difficult for children to develop their visual literacy. She thinks that we ought to change the way we expose students to images so that we can more properly train visual literacy and ultimately create a smarter generation of people overall.
I would have to disagree with Avgerinou. I think there is certainly a point where too many images in our environment could increase stress and make the world feel overwhelming, but for most places I've been, we're far from that point. The author makes the point that constantly listening to an iPod doesn't make you better at writing music, but for someone interested in making music, it certainly does. In all forms of art, the more you're exposed to, the more tools you have going forward in creating you own art. Similarly, making charts and infographics would be a huge challenge if you have never seen one, so the more examples of good images I can see, the more informed I will be when I'm making a graphic of my own.
There is a solid chance I misunderstood the article, but this is my two cents on the issue I explained above.
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