When you are analyzing, organizing and sequencing information for particular kinds of documents, that method still has no competition. We have always recognized that the results of an Information Mapping analysis can be presented in a variety of formats. But I think visual language goes way beyond that interpretation. Visual language is being spoken as a language all over the world, most frequently without the benefit of the writer's having even known about Information Mapping. So we have to realize that visual language is emerging as a language.
People can communicate with it and they can think with it.
This makes it possible to take a course in visual language without having taken an Information Mapping course. That is a big difference. So it also makes a difference how we teach them. A methodology has a set of relatively precise steps, which you follow to produce a document. In the case of Information Mapping's methodology, there are classes of documents, which have classes of maps and blocks associated with them.