VisuaPedia: a social media based visual encyclopedia

The ongoing evolution of Web 2.0 means that online applications not only attempt to catch the public eye but also vie to engage individuals and user communities through increasingly interactive mediums of communication, entertainment, socialization, and information sharing. Online publishing technologies cover all three major lines of communication (i.e., image, text and video), enabling online communities to share knowledge and experience in a fraction of second via the web. Moreover, some popular websites are beginning to blur boundaries between entertainment and education. In this paper, we overview one such innovation developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration between education, communications, and computer engineering faculty. In combining compelling artistic methods and meaningful user-generated narratives, VisuaPedia aims to engineer a collaborative learning process that exemplifies a simultaneously entertaining and educational experience. In short, VisuaPedia is powered by drawing and animation tools and is driven by the creative production of its user community. The VisuaPedia internet platform will enable youths to bring real-world concepts and imagined worlds to animated life through collective progression of drawings, images, characters, and animations. Much like a wiki, it can coordinate both the construction and sharing of knowledge. In this way, VisuaPedia aims to provide an innovative interactive platform in which youths can join, participate, learn and share their ideas online. Rather than lengthy and sometimes 'difficult-to-understand' textual descriptions, VisuaPedia takes a 'draw and animate' approach to weave ideas together and illuminate young voices in an innovative, refreshing and fun way.