1) Instruct the students to look around their office, workspace or wherever their computer is located and note the pictures or hanging decorations, perhaps the color scheme, the style of furniture, etc. Do such items revel aspects of the owners or institutions "personality." Would others arrive at the same conclusions? Post thoughts and examples on the WebBoard.

2) Instruct students to keep a journal for one or two days, noting all visual symbols encountered. Where were they found...were their meanings obvious...also...have the student discuss if he or she would use the same or different symbols in order to convey the message.

3) Send students out into cyberspace to obtain a variety of definitions of "Visual Literacy". Share them on the WebBoard and based upon those found, have the student develop his or her own. What about having students create a "visual" definition of "visual literacy" using images found on the web?

4) Have students on the WebBoard provide examples of houw they put "Visual Literacy" to work in theri lives on a daily basis. Perhaps this should come before students actually begin working with the definitions. At the end of the course, students could repeat the original exercise.

5) Rhonda could post some case studies for students to review and answer questions about on WebBoard.

6) A "Missing Link" type exercises, where students are presented with three related images, two of which are visible, the third, in the middle is not. Using their skills of decoding (or perhaps some instructor developed clues), students must determine what the missing image is. The answer can then be presente in class after all students have had a chance to guess.

7) "Ask the Expert". There are several ways to use experts.

a) For assistance with the research paper, a student could go to www.ivla.org and through the links page find contact information for individuals or teams who have authored papers, projects, etc. on the student's topic of choice. The student could then develop a series of short questions to be posed to the author(s). E-mail author(s) and include their responses in the paper.

b) Along similar lines, a small group of students could be assigned the role of "interviewers" for each topic at the beginning of the semester. It would be the responsibility of the group to determine a proper "expert" for that topic (either through the additional readings or through a web-search)...create a series of short interview questions....post those questions...allow others to comment on the questions...contact the individual to see if an interview could be arranged...post follow-up responses.

c) If the "expert" were another NIU professor, it COULD be possible to schedule a WebBoard chat. However, I'm not sure we want to get into chat at all.

d) Again with an NIU prof., he or she could more simply respond to WebBoard asynchronous questions written by the students. d) Again with an NIU prof., he or she could more simply respond to WebBoard asynchronous questions written by the students.

8) Similar to the "Missing Link",a student could submit to the site a description of visual images found in a well known film (without stating the title) and have the other students guess as to what the mystery film is based upon those images.