Reflections
- How has your colleague’s experience differed from yours? And how do you know? The experience differed in the digital platform that we each chose to present the mode bending task. I re-designed the task in the form of an interactive digital book, using the online program Book Creator. Erin chose a social media application, Tik Tok, as her re-design for the task. The process that Erin had to take to create her Tik Tok video was quite strategical. From the music choice, simple text, filming, transitions, and voice overs. Her mode-bending presentation allows for accessibility for different types of learners since Erin’s Tik Tok supports visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic learners. She used the text-to-speech application on the program to have her text be read aloud and made careful consideration of the timing in between frames. Using a social media platform forms a sense of “creation of virtual communities” enables “greater autonomy for different lifeworlds” (p 71) as stated by The New London Group (1996). The development of social media platforms allows for “private lives are being made more public as everything becomes a potential for media discussion” (p 70). Therefore the importance of acknowledging and teaching to digital citizenship is vital for all ages of learners.
- What literacies does their site privilege or deny in comparison and contrast to yours? As Erin states in her post, “mode-bending is a great exercise to get out of your comfort zone, try new things and be creative. It forced me to think about many possibilities that I normally would not pursue” I could not agree more with this statement, as I felt the same way when using Book Creator. I have used this application very briefly to utilize the camera and recording tools but I challenged myself with incorporating other options such as embedding links and GIFs to make the digital book more interactive for the readers. The New London Group (1996), states that the “notion of design connects powerfully to the sort of creative intelligence the best practitioners need” in order to “redesign their activities in the very act of practice” (p 73). As an educator, I am continuously looking for ways to innovate my teaching practice to motivate my students to be engaged and involved with the process of being creative to showcase learning.
- What theoretical underpinnings are evident in your/your colleague’s textual architecture and how does this affect one’s experience of the work?The New London Group (1996), says that when thinking about re-designing, the process of transformation includes the “new use of old materials, a re-articulation and recombination of the given resources of Available Designs” (p 76). It is essentially a form of metalanguage, which is “a language for talking about language, images, texts, and meaning-making interactions” (p 77). To further analyze this thought, I used Figure 1, “Multiliteracies: Metalanguages to Describe and Interpret the Design Elements of Different Modes of Learning” to create a graphic that shows our design concepts.
Both Erin and I focused primarily on the Linguistic Design of the task. Visual design was the next highly focused area. (I’m sure we could argue that our presentations apply to many more of the points in the figure but I provided a brief analysis.) I am not surprised by the results since language is visual. You can’t describe language without including some sort of element that includes visuals to support color, perspectives, and foreground/background context.
Conclusion
I enjoyed this task and was quite inspired by what my other colleagues have created for this mode-bending assignment. I completed a quiz that was created through Genially on another blog and that has inspired me to give this program a try. I’m a little less inclined to use Tik Tok as a sharing platform that I could encourage my students to use at the elementary level. Perhaps, one of you can change my mind otherwise? How would you go about making Tik Tok classroom friendly and how do you factor in privacy issues?
References
- The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.