ABSTRACT
The chapter provides the reader towards a framework for discussing the elusive process of visual communication — for if vision may have seemed mutable as a consequence. Visual communication is a major transmitter of our cultural heritage, second only to the spoken word. The printed word, paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, cartography, charts, diagrams, graphs, film and television are all visual forms of communication and they depend centrally on the complex process of visual cognition. In relating visual communication to learning, one faces the special task of bringing something with wide cultural use and traditions of practice into contact with the specialist fields of pedagogic theory and practice. Education is parasitic on the modes of communication available in our culture and it is from this more general perspective that we need to understand visual communication. In 1968 a group of radio astronomers discovered, almost by accident, the existence of a radio source which showed regular fluctuations in energy.
