This week we revisited the New London Group’s seminal paper on “multiliteracies” as it relates to pedagogy, and the broad concept of digital literacy as outlined by Teresa M. Dobson and John Willinsky. As we progress into the “late age of print” (Bolter, 2001) and reflect on what it means to be a “digital native” (without connotations, if possible), I too can’t help but wonder whether this age is the sunset of prose. It seems plausible that the mechanistic act of reading as a process of knowledge transfer, could be replaced by a communication medium that is faster and more efficient, and as a possibility, it follows naturally from my previous musings about “technology” and its impact on our behaviours and ways of thinking, because we apparently, continuously, seek ways to increase convenience and decrease effort ().

Our readings have often highlighted the apprehension of what may result from the adoption of new technology (Ong, 2012; Bolter, 2001; Postman, 2011), and the way it shapes thought and consciousness, so it is reasonable to expect that the digital and information transformation we are currently experiencing will also reshape the way we think and communicate. It is incumbent upon us as educators to promote designs and a vision of this new way of thinking and communicating that, “…instantiate[s] a vision through pedagogy that creates… a transformed set of relationships and possibilities for social futures…” (New London Group, 1996, p. 72).

To further explore the designed experience of “What’s in my bag”, we were asked to transmediate the visual image of the contents of our bag into an alternate semiotic or sensory mode. I chose to employ ChatGPT to help me convert the JPG image of my bag’s contents into an audio file, and then generate a visual waveform of the artifact. Here’s my `request-response` with ChatGPT 5:

This resulted in some back-and-forth to try and identify and correct the error I was encountering:

I was finally able to generate the following waveform visualization, complete with the audio transmediation of my original image:

Although this was an interesting exercise in the use of audio/video transcoding software (`python`, `ffmpeg`), I’m of the opinion that it serves limited utility to a human in today’s day and age.

Perhaps at some future date this artifact may be deemed advantageous in some way: could this audiogram could impart vector-type properties to visual elements in the future?; could the smaller size – 103KB vs. the original’s 947KB be attractive? We may never know!

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dobson, T. M., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (pp. 286–312). Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-literacy/digital-literacy/219EED91FE30D9370DC76816FEACDCE8

Peña, E., & James, K. (2024). A framework of transmediation. Convergence, 30(5), 1610-1624. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231220325.

Postman, N. (2011). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. (Original work published 1992).

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.