Kangaroo Rock: A Multimodal Artifact

Here is an artifact that illustrates the affordances of multimodality that my students and I made together last school year.

From Technologies and Literacies

Although I wrote the text (sometimes transcribing verbal stories or descriptions from my students), they contributed to producing the newspaper by drawing pictures, providing captions and descriptions, and telling a story.

From Technologies and Literacies

Both students and teachers all over the school enjoyed the newspaper. We printed out several hard copies and also sent copies electronically to our "subscribers".

Have Meaning, Will Travel

The most important concept I took away from chapter 7 of Travel Notes from the NLS is that "meaning can travel and traverse modes" and that "literacy does not travel" (Kell, p. 165).

The mode of Noma's meaning (her house was in need of repair) transformed as it traversed the margins of distinct activity systems, from verbal presentation (or performance) to written text, to conversation and community discourse.

Multimodal Literacy

FLY ME TO THE MOON
by Eric Carson

made in Comic Creator

I am in favor of letting children explore language and text in a variety of formats, such as picture books and comics. Beyond just reading Manga or comics, online sites exist that provide image libraries, dialog bubbles, and story frames that allow kids to create and share their own comics.


By searching 'comic creator' and 'manga creator,' several interesting sites are found, including:

MashON Spore This site has an extensive image and background library, however it may be more interesting to boys (similar to the descriptions of Shonen manga). I tried to make my own comic, but felt a bit clumsy using their editor.

Make Beliefs Comix! This site has only a few choices for images, but may actually encourage greater creativity by requiring the user to create imagery through text to compensate for limited graphics.

Newspaper Clipping Generator Although not really multimodal on it's own, this fun newspaper clipping creator could be combined with visual images, allowing kids to create authentic looking digital artifacts to enhance projects.

Comic Creator Another simple way to author one's own comic strip. More options for story board size than Make Beliefs. Also, these can't be saved on the website. One must print or save it locally.

Laika, a Soviet space dog, was the first living mammal to orbit the Earth.

Educational Leadership's Literacy 2.0

In Educational Leadership's current issue(a publication of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development), each article centers around a theme of Literacy 2.0. One entire article is devoted to defining 2.0 literacies.

Personally, terms like Web 2.0 or words beginning with i make me cringe. Do we really want to start numbering our collective advancements of ICTs and literacy practices? Does literacy 2.0 accurately reflect that language and communication have been changing and responding to human activities for thousands of years before wikis and blogs? Was all of human language prior to the printing press the equivalent of the literacy beta-test?

Back to the current issue of Ed Leadership, Naomi Baron contributed an article about mobile technologies' effects on speech and written language. While much of it is similar to her discussions in Always On, it does highlight the preoccupation of the popular press with the superficial effects of acronyms popping up in student speech and writing. Baron argues that relaxed attitudes towards grammar and spelling may be more detrimental.

A text-to-self connection with Baron ch. 9 :)

On page 199 of Always On, Naomi Baron retells a short story about an internet company that singularly determined that readers now have to be responsible for the accuracy of stories, not the internet journalists who compose them. The justification from the official was that internet journalists have to "work very fast."

About a year ago, I noticed an error in something that was on the front page of the Yahoo! site. Normally, I don't bother correcting errors that I catch in someone else's print, but this was a big mistake, so I responded by using a 'questions/comments' link on the same page (I can't recall what the error was, though - wish I could).

The message I received back was similar to the response of the official in Baron's story. "We repost news items and stories that we get from other sources so it's not our problem" was the gist of it. Apparently, Yahoo! is fine with mediating inaccurate content. I imagine many other internet sites, including newspaper sites, are just as guilty of using content without checking the accuracy.

A month or two after that, I noticed another error on the same site. I didn't bother reporting the error because I'd learned valuable lessons the first time around:
1) Yahoo! is not interested in disseminating accurate information
2) Yahoo! doesn't care to report they posted inaccurate information from another source
3) Yahoo! doesn't care to correct their inaccurate information from another source
3) I don't trust anything I read on Yahoo! to necessarily be accurate

I probably should substitute 'all internet sites' for Yahoo! in my lessons, but I'll give each a shot to retract and apologize for a news item that was posted inaccurately. I recognize that 'internet journalists' have to work fast and that sometimes mistakes will be made. Just don't call yourself a journalist if you're not willing to correct those mistakes.