Have found the book i’ve been looking for: Carey Jewitt’s “Technology, Literacy and Learning: a multimodal approach“.
Dr Jewitt, an Academic Fellow funded by the UK Research Council, has a complex take on literacies, involving social semiotics, ‘activity theory’, and the potential for multimodality to have a big impact on the way people learn. I’m looking forward to finding out more about how “image, sound, writing and movement on screen contributes to the construction of school knowledge and potentials for learning.”
Her focus is on schools, rather than adult education, and one impetus for the book was noticing how some children use technology differently in their home environment (compared to the school environments she was researching).
In the last year or two, we have seen a huge rise in the use of audio online, and now video. Some studies have pointed out the enormous value of the sound of the human voice. For example, in her work around “Different Voices, Different Spaces“, Delia Bradshaw has spoken of the potential for emotional connection, when the voice is involved. Many educators in the Australian Flexible Learning Framework have pointed out the usefulness of Digital Storytelling as an engagement strategy. The concept of “visual literacy” has risen sharply in the educational consciousness.
People connect with images, sound and moving pictures – so how does this multimodal approach assist literacy learning?