View and listen as Clio the Cultural Anthropologist and I discuss the items in my bag.
*dialogue created with Humy.ai
https://www.kukarella.com/dialogues-ai/gzzGdwRoVx1F4HPYApd5
Often, teachers will afford students different assignment choices to show their learning. As Pena and James point out (2024), “Transmediation in a pedagogical context is commonplace, yet seldom is it identified as such, nor is it the subject of explicit teaching; often, however, it is a part of a devised curriculum that accommodates differentiated learning and learning styles” (p. 1619). As a student, if given choices for an assignment, I would most likely choose the traditional essay writing assignment. I don’t consider myself artistic or creative, nor do I particularly enjoy acting or speaking in front of a group.
Due to my preference for traditional writing assignments, this task has proved to be the most challenging for me so far. Along with struggling to come up with a creative semiotic mode change, I struggled to clarify the difference between semiotic and sensory modes. This was compounded by the lack of clear definitions of terms in the 1996 New London Group article, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures, where modes of meaning are suggested as linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial and multimodal. I was further confused by the concept of the different modes of meaning because the linguistic design is presented as a stand-alone mode. However, I feel language is inherently intertwined with the other modes. We need language to think, so language is involved even when viewing an image with no words.
Peña & James (2024) “propose three categories of non-exclusionary transmediation: sensory, semiotic, and signal transmediation” (p. 1614), which was helpful as I tried to navigate this task. Additionally, Danielsson & Selander (2021) helped further clarify this for me by stating, “semiotic resources are resources that we use to organize our understanding of the world and to make meaning in communication with others or to make meaning for ourselves (p. 17). These articles helped me realize that this task wasn’t about changing the sensory mode—something I had initially fixated on—but rather about shifting the semiotic mode, which is different from sensory. When I decided to use Humy.ai to create an interview-like dialogue about what was in my bag, I was worried because it was still visual. You look at the picture, and you need to look at the words of an interview, but I now understand that it changes the semiotic mode because it is a different genre. In Humy.ai, I chose Clio the Cultural Anthropologist as the chatbot to interact with as it seemed like the best fit for the task of analyzing what is in the bag. After creating the interview, I also used Kukarella to create a podcast-style audio interview, both to explore new tools and to enhance accessibility. It was important for me to find a tool that would change text to audio with two different voice so that it became an interview.
In terms of meaning-making, this new mode is beneficial. It was interesting for me to complete the activity; even though it was AI-generated, I found the responses intriguing. On the other hand, the picture is much less time-consuming both for me to produce and for the audience to examine. A picture provides an instant overview, while an interview unfolds over time, segmenting the information into distinct pieces.
References:
Danielsson, K., Selander, S. (2021). Semiotic Modes and Representations of Knowledge. In: Multimodal Texts in Disciplinary Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63960-0_3
Peña, E., & James, K. (2024). A framework of transmediation. Convergence, 30(5), 1610-1624. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231220325
The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.