#multimodalities

For week 13′s reading response, Developing Multimodal Academic Literacies among College Freshmen, by  Gloria E. Jacobs argues that multimodal academic literacies should be taught within traditional writing classes in order to construct creative learning opportunities. The term multimodalities is the use of one or more types of genres at the same time to help inform others with the genre’s flow and incorporation with other genres. Multimodal academic literacies help students to better understand on how academic arguments are constructed. Not only does this help us to understand about academic arguments, but  Gloria E. Jacobs states that, “ Doing so may be an important part of guiding their development as academic thinkers and writers, as well as preparing them for engagement in a media rich society.” 

I can connect this weeks reading to my major because the classes that I am currently taking, that relate to my major, use some type of multimodal when teaching. Such as my nutrition class allows us to use our phones and participate in quizzes we have in class as well as project the lecture slides into our phones with the app called tophat. With academic literacies, as a Kinesiology major, I need evidence to help support my claims and when I have to do a presentation about the human muscular system, appropriate pictures or a video can be used to help others understand more clearly, with the use of visualization, instead of just reading the traditional text of how the function of a muscle is preformed. It will help others and even me to better understand the deeper understanding of how the human body works. 

 This reading helped me to understand how important multimodal academic literacies is when presenting an argument. With the use of text and visualizations it helps my essays or presentations to be interpreted clearly in what I’m trying to preach out. This also helped me to understand how multimodal has always been used since technology was first created and we should use technology to our advantage to help us become better academic thinkers and writers. 

This correlates to my groups AVA project as the author as well studied a certain groups project. After reading the article I became well aware of how multimodal academic literacies help to shape our arguments and to better establish our AVA project in order to persuade the audience. Also I have become more aware of understanding the topic we have chosen to argue about the more we go into depth of our project.

The question that is on my mind that this article prompts me to ask is that if there is such a thing were using too much moltimodalities can take away the purpose of a video, website or flyer is trying to convey? 

Part 1

“The act of designing leaves the designer Redesigned (Cope and Kalantzis 2010, 177).”

This quote summarizes the multiliteracies of design quite sufficiently. As the text explains, a designer can take something (available design), edit and transforming that thing how you see fit, or what it represents (designing), finally transforming into a final product (redesigned). The designer creates new meanings through transforming an available design. For example, a designer can take an image of a bird and transform it into a solid blue bird-shaped image. The result is now an image, a brand that represents Twitter. However, available designs are not limited to images; they could also be forms of communication.

Part 2: Critical Reflection

With the advancement of technology and society, new literacies and modalities begin to emerge. From prehistory with oral culture to writing to the invention of the typewriter and the computer, technology has come a long way to create new ways to communicate. Something that Cope and Kalantzis, and Rowsell and Walsh have discussed in their articles is new ways to learn and communicate, and to transform an idea/concept and creating its own entity, even going so far as to rethinking literacy in a constantly changing society. Literacy has changed and, as future educators, we must adapt to this change.

An important concept is the multimodality of meanings. Traditionally, literacy teaching was mainly in written form. However, alongside the written language, new modes have emerged: oral language, visual representation, audio representation, tactile representation, and gestural representation, representation to oneself, and spatial representation (Cope and Kalantzis 2010, p. 178-179). In these various ways we learn to communicate, even using newer technology to represent these new modes. For example, we can write down the word “hello,” wave, say “hello,” or listen to someone say “hello” and the meaning would remain the same, but the modes are different.

Digital literacies allow people to communicate in various ways. Learning how to use Microsoft Excel or Facebook or Twitter would allow us to convey information in a different manner. The internet only complicates this further by attributing various ways that one can communicate with others. For example, Rowsell and Walsh looked at a study examining teenagers’ texting habits. The researchers observed that teenagers were conscious of “choosing different tones and language styles depending on who they were IMing (Rowsell and Walsh 2011, p. 57).” The youth took something simple and made something unique that created a new identity. The advent of instant messaging offered a new way to learn and be creative, especially among the youth.

Bibliography

Cope, Bill and Kalantzis, Mary. “‘Multiliteracies’: New Literacies, New Learning”, Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4 (3), 2009. 164-195.