The 3 R’s, the long held foundation of teaching, are adding another letter to their crew.  Looking to increase the effective communication of knowledge, several companies are shifting to visual tools and technologies.  Amongst them, different approaches are beginning to emerge.

While SSRN has recently beta tested adding audio and video content to the eLibrary, JoVE

is making a huge splash in biological experiments.  JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, is a journal for biological   experiments and the content is entirely in video format.

Several others are making everyday content more appealing by visualizing it.  One example is Pulse – a beautiful news aggregator that creates a “visual mosaic” of your individualized content.

It seems that the days of using the Encyclopedia Britannica to write your term paper are quickly coming to an end.  YouTube has become an increasingly popular source for research – from ‘how to’s, to gathering topic specific content – and questions are being raised like, “Is YouTube The Future of Online Education?”  It goes without saying that iTunes U has changed educational content with their video Podcasts.  Purdue OWL has even added reference formatting for online videos and Podcasts.

Visual learning is as old as the first picture books. And like day-glo fashions, what’s old is certainly what’s new again.