Week 7 Introduction to the range of new literacies (IV)

Week 7 Introduction to the range of new literacies (IV)

 

Assignment #1 

  The article “Theories and Practices of Multimodal Education: The Instructional Dynamics of Picture Books and Primary Classrooms” describes multimodal education in terms of theories and practices. The article consists of two main sections: section one describes and outlines multimodal aspects of texts and sociocognitive aspects of literacy learning. The second section discusses “an on going research project in which elementary school teachers collaborated with us to design and teach literacy curricula that uses children’s picture books with highly visual and interactive textual elements”. Section one discusses the shift that has occurred in reading today, due to the demands of digital media and visual texts. Teachers and students have modified from traditional print-based education to multimodal education. Print itself can take many forms through visual design, graphics, and images that require new ways of coding and decoding these text-relations. Bezemer and Kress (2008) define mode as a “socially and culturally shaped resource for meaning making.” Print is an example of a “mode” of communication. Font is also a “mode” of communication, because the way it is signified and represented. Reader’s sociocognitive processes of making meaning out of text are constantly informed by and altered through the use of digital media and multiple modes of representation. For example, the color of a word can be interpreted differently from one reader’s to another’s.

             Section two discusses a research study that examined children’s engagement with interactive and visual texts. The purpose of the study was to use multimodal texts in early literacy instruction, beyond using current theories of reading to engage with new forms of texts. This article explains the importance of educators and teachers to add new roles and techniques to their traditional teaching styles, because we live in a digital age. Larson and Marsh (2005) explained that,“teachers need to adopt three additional roles in order to facilitate children’s navigation of complex, multimodal, electronic worlds” (teacher as resource manage, teacher as constructor of knowledge, and teacher as design consultant). I think this is very important for teachers to understand, because these activities are the foundation of new literacies. 


            Assignment #2

 Ok, apparently my computer is too old to download second life... so I downloaded it on my friends computer.