Jami Carlacio | multimodal composing

These days, everyone, it seems, is wired -- it's not uncommon to see a cell phone, ipod, nano, or similar device attached to the ear, held in the hand, or hiding in the pocket of a shirt or jeans. Besides the devices that frame our lives, we've gotten pretty savvy with Internet technology. We blog, we contribute to wikis, we affect politics, we make our voices heard across the globe; we get our news and entertainment at the speed --almost--of light.

Multimodal Literacy: For simplicity's sake, let's define new media (technologies) as a constellation of media -- from screen to print; from moving and still images to sound; from PowerPoint to wikis and blogs; from the Internet to the Ipod -- that enable us to make meaning, to manipulate sounds, words, images, to communicate with a variety of people in virtually every imaginable way.

Our students come to college equipped with basic techno-literacies but they don't necessarily use these literacies critically or ethically. We have the opportunity-- the imperative--to shape how they both produce and consume technology. To see sample assignments, go back to the previous page.

Some sites that use new media:

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/
http://chnm.gmu.edu/
http://dmp.osu.edu

Litercacy implies the ability to think critically, to conceptualize, to read, write, and negotiate visual (still and moving) images, to encode and decode audio messages, to communicate complex meanings that involve pictures and not (necessarily) words.

Effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple Englishes, and communication patterns that more frequently cross cultural, community, and national boundaries."[1]

"We need to help our students (as well as ourselves) learn how different choices in visual arrangement in all texts (on screen and off) encourage different kinds of meaning making and encourage us to take up (overtly or not) various values." [2]

Listen to Ohio State University professor Cynthia Selfe on multimodality

References
1. New London Group. "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Harvard Educational Review 66: (60-92).

2. Anne Wysocki. "With Eyes that Think, and Compose and Think: On Visual Rhetoric." Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction. Ed. P. Takayoshi and B. Huot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 182-201.

Jami L. Carlacio