Visual Literacy Standards

I am back from an incredible month in Uganda (highly recommended, especially if you are not too attached to hot water showers), and waiting for me in my inbox was an announcement about a new blog on developing Visual Literacy Competency Standards from the Image Resources Interest Group (IRIG) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).  ACRL brought us the much used Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, so this is a very welcome development for educators who teach visual literacy.  As our culture and so many others have increasingly adopted images to communicate, including selling, convincing, illustrating, etc., visual literacy is really an important topic for everyone, not just those in the arts.

IRIG has posted five potential definitions of visual literacy proposed at their meeting during this year's American Library Association conference in Washington, DC.  What do you think about these definitions?  I look forward to the final product, which will be an especially helpful instruction guide for academic librarians and visual resources professionals.

Image: Trey Ratcliff (Stuck in Customs), The Sunset of Your Childhood, 2008.  Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 GenericLicense.