Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

You don't need a degree in rocket science to know that visually organized data appeals more to students than plain text-based scribble. The visual stimulus is quickly captured by the brain and requires way less processing to understand and code it than written text. As teachers, we need to capitalize on this and try to include as many relevant visuals as possible. One way to do this is to use these visual alternatives to Google Docs.

Infographics can play a powerful role in making the story of a library more meaningful to stakeholders.

Silk is a free service that offers some fantastic tools for creating and sharing data visualizations. To create a visualization on Silk you can upload data in a spreadsheet, manually enter data, or...

Innovative design crosses over all aspects of education. The American Society for Innovation Design in Education, or ASIDE, seeks to infuse curriculum with new approaches to teaching and thinking. Integrating the design of information into the daily conversation is an essential part of the teacher's toolkit and the purpose of the ASIDE blog. The underpinning of innovation and educational design is based on looking at the information available and communicating meaning for a world of learners. Thinking like a designer can transform the way children learn. ASIDE's goal is to bring together as much information, resources and supportive scholarship in one place for teaching and learning.

Text mining and data mining are just two among a growing number of applied technologies. Jisc Inform explores how these and others are being developed to help researchers do everything from the mundane – such as managing routine research tasks more effectively – to the truly remarkable.

In medical research, text mining can be used to review tens of thousands of pages of research papers simultaneously and detect patterns and associations that could otherwise easily remain hidden from researchers. Those previously unimagined connections could help to bring about rapid, important advances in understanding disease pathology, genetics and drug development.