My original semiotic mode was tailored towards an English-reader accessing the content via the blog on a PC which may meet the requirements for this course but, if targeted towards my typical audience of students, fails to meet their requirements for engaging material. It is less optimized for mobile devices, may not be at their language level, or be in their first language at all. I was struck by the statement in this week’s readings that “[d]iversity is pivotal in today’s life-worlds” (Cope and Kalantzis, 2009, p. 173) in particular to trends in technology and student agency. My goal for this week’s task was to recreate a description of what was in my bag as well as why in a format that eschewed the requirements of reading written English. I was inspired by the multimodal methods described by the New London Group as well as recognizing that “flexibility is critical because the relationship between descriptive and analytical categories and actual events is, by its nature, shifting, provisional, unsure and relative to the contexts and purposes of analysis.” (The New London Group, 1996, p. 24)
I see the use of a video to be in line with Dobson and Willinsky’s observations how digital literacies can be seen as an extension of traditional literacies where
“language and language use have always been fluid and variable, changing over time and in different sociocultural contexts […] the advent of electronic textuality reminds us of this, inviting us to reconsider our presuppositions about reading and writing – which are infused with assumptions specific to print – to “re-formulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes” (p. 263).” (2009, p. 295)
Restructuring my Task 1 had me utilizing multiple modes as I planned out my video using both linguistic and visual methods by writing notes and then story-boarding. While my planning and reflection both use linguistic modes and visual meanings, my video tries to ignore linguistic modes in favour of favouring visual, audio, gestural, and spatial meanings. The reimagined Task definitely makes assumptions about the literacies of the viewer, including a basic grasp of digital literacy which “assumes visual literacy and entails both the ability to comprehend what is represented and the ability to comprehend the internal logics and encoding schemes of that representation” (Dobson & Willinsky, 2009, p. 298).
Increasing the approachability through multiple modalities helped me examine Dobson and Willinsky’s statement that electronic literacies exist as “a “democratic medium,” with that democratic element existing in tension with the Internet’s top-down economics, as well as its privileging of English-language and masculine cultures.” (2009, p. 297) As a digital citizen who falls into these two categories I have to be cognizant of the privileges available to me in my communication both at work and at home. It was an interesting challenge to try and communicate what and why certain objects live in my bag without using written or oral language. The exercise certainly had me appreciating the different literacies I possessed to tell this narrative: digital literacy to film and edit the footage, visual literacy to stylize shots and story, as well as a physical literacy to use body language and gestures to communicate non-verbally.
*In a non-serious observation I also got to practice my profane literacy as running into technical difficulties with my home computer not wanting to work with the footage captured certainly brings out the best in me…
Sources Cited
Bill Cope & Mary Kalantzis (2009) “Multiliteracies”: New Literacies, New Learning, Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4:3, 164-195, DOI:10.1080/15544800903076044
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.