Literacy is multimodal. People communicate through symbols other than writing. Students may be more familiar and comfortable with other types of symbol creation. Students understanding of all types of symbol making can be used to enrich their understanding of literacy both traditional and multimodal. Students will be asked to be literate in more than just reading in their future jobs and lives. Language arts in schools should better reflect the use of literacy in the lives of students.
Students will not encounter literacy that is as verbal or text centered as it is in the classroom. We are doing them a disservice by making this so. At risk students may also have more opportunity to be successful if literacy in the classroom is open to a more multimodal approach. Children's first experiences of literacy is connected to images. There is not a good reason to remove images as students get older. Many students that have difficulty reading can not create images in their heads of what they are reading. They can not visualize what they are reading. Bringing images back to text may help these students begin to visualize.
Texts are material and should not be transparent. Changing texts from a material paper to the internet does not lesson their materiality. However, this change in form should not be ignored. The change in technology changes writing and literacy. It changes how literacy is used, how it looks and how it is interpreted.
Connecting pictures to text is not new. There is a long history in the use of pictures with text. New technologies have made images free and easier to obtain. It has "destroyed the authority of art." (Selzer and Crowley, 1999) Advertising uses images and text. They use cultural associations to communicate with the audience through images. Images on the internet can have material consequences.
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I am an visual artist and photographer whose main interest is in visualizing abstractions. So this book title named below relating to visualization caught my eye in a random google search.
I was reading a synopsis of Multimodal Analysis: An Integrative Approach for Scientific Visualizing on the Web at http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/main.asp
I didn't know what multimodal literacy was. Your site came up second in my google search.
Your comments were very easy to follow and understand.
Your note - It has "destroyed the authority of art." (Selzer and Crowley, 1999) was intriguing but a quick google search told me nothing.
Please tell me more about Selzer and Crowley. Does everbody know about multimodal literacy but me?
Perhaps you are a teacher and mutimodal is the latest buzzword in your world.
I was seeking to find a term for people who seem to have the ability to make links and connections easily. Is that part of the definition of multimodal?
Thanks.
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