Task 7: Mode-Bending

Mode-changing enables us as Designers of multimodal literacies to both inherit and create new meanings, thus empowering us to design social, workplace, public, and community futures (NLG, 1996). In essence, we are involved in developing new uses of old materials with various design modalities (NLG, 1996). For this task, I redesigned Task 1 into an exclusively Audio Design vs. its original inception as a blending of Linguistic and Visual Design. The task “What’s in Your Bag?” is by default linguistic and visual, employing written language to convey what is portrayed in a photo or even artistic rendition of the contents of one’s bag. To make this compelling to a listener, I took full advantage of the Audio Design elements at my disposal to create a “podcast” experience: equipped with intro and outro music, accompanying sound effects and high-quality voice recording and editing, I created an “episode” as if the segment is part of a broader podcast series. To engage the listener further, I avoided simply describing the items and their “literacies” and instead opted to set them up as a “game” for listeners to speculate about and guess at: this encourages more active listening and thoughtfulness when compared against the original design modalities of the task. As noted by Dobson and Willinsky (2009), digital literacy seems to be fostering a higher degree of participation in various activities due to the ease of writing, enhanced linking of ideas and texts, and the aspiration of providing universal access to knowledge. Engaging in this task compelled me to think more critically about how content can be presented through a myriad of modalities to garner an audience and facilitate meaningful participation.

I would make the case that audio-visual modes have become more prevalent, but not necessarily at the expense of written ones: rather, these modes are still very much dependent upon solid written foundations. For instance, when someone watches a YouTube video or listens to a podcast, the content creator still often needs some degree of scripting to ensure their materials ‘flows’ well, written content for transitions/chapters/segments, and even the inclusion of Closed Captioning (CC) for accessibility. Additionally, websites such as Tumblr and Pinterest tend to blend such Designs together – particularly Linguistic and Visual. I don’t believe the question should be “Which modes are dominating?”, but rather “Which modes are dominating which spaces and why? For whom is this content created?”

The Information Age has necessitated not only a general understanding of multiliteracies, but also working knowledge of how to produce them: this is especially true for educators, as they are increasingly challenged to create multimodal content to engage and instruct their learners. NLG (1996) asserts that meaning making requires inheriting and (re)creating multimodal relations within electronic multimedia. Millennials and Zoomers specifically have been acclimated to this reality through simply navigating the world as it currently exists – information permeates our daily lives through the devices and apps we use to the cultures and subcultures that influence (and are influenced by) them. To create relevancy, educators must recognize and integrate subjectivities (e.g., interests, purposes) with their respective languages and discourses to foster compelling learning experiences (NLG, 1996).

References

Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy. In D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology, pp. 286-312). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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