This course introduces innovative approaches to learning and teaching, with a focus on the use of e-learning and social web technologies.
8.3 A Grammar of Multimodal Meaning
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來自 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 的課程
Multimodal Literacies: Communication and Learning in the Era of Digital Media
12 個評分
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
12 個評分
從本節課中
Module 1: Course Orientation + Multimodal Meaning and Synesthesia
This module introduces the key ideas of the course: communication, representation (or making meanings for oneself as an aid to thinking), and the design of meaning. Today, our tools for communication and representation have been widely expanded by digital tools. For these reasons, we need to extend our literacy pedagogy to encompass literacies in the plural, including a wider range of modes of meaning than alphabetic text alone.
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Dr William CopeProfessor
Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, College of Education
Dr Mary KalantzisDean
College of Education
The last major component of this theory of meaning making in the world.
So, literacy was about
the business of written text in the world in its traditional forms, right?
But in the world today, what we find is this extraordinary mix of modes and
what we've done is we've built a classification scheme of modes of meaning
which we've represented here in this diagram.
And in fact, if we really think hard,
that not only does this represent the kind of complex
meanings that happened In the world of new media, digital media, the internet today.
Therefore, that means that we have to expand our notions of literacy.
But in fact even traditionally, there were all kinds of relationships,
in other words written meanings were also spatial.
Spoken meanings were also, had an audio component which is porosity.
That often there was gestural many as closely connected for
example, in theater and drama.
So, even in traditional genres of literacy, the mono model,
alphabetical reading and writing view of literacy was excessively narrow.
But in this era,
it's just crazily narrow in terms of the transformations we've seen over the last
couple of decades, particularly around the emergence of digital media.
So we've built here this kind of schema.
And what we've done,
I'm going to go around each of the modes in this circle now and discuss them.
What we've done is we've deliberately separated oral and
written meanings because they are unbelievably different.
So, one of the real problems with teaching phonics in a rule-bound kind of way,
it assumes the relationship between a reality and literacy between writing and
speaking is simply a transliteration of speech.
Well, it's not.
The last, if you went back and passed what I've just said, and
I'm not speaking to a written script, I'm speaking to these diagrams,
I'm speaking conversationally, there are no sentences.
There would have been sentences if I was reading a script, but I'm not.
There are no sensors.
It's just a crazy jumble of clauses one after the other.
A bit redundant, a bit chaotic because that's what all the mind can do if you're
just speaking, if you're not reading a script.
Reading a script it's a different exercise, by the way,
that's simply reading out writing.
That's not really oral language.
So, anyhow, if you do that there are no sentences, there are no paragraphs,
it's just this kind of, and also it's very very redundant.
When we write, we carefully don't repeat things.
We look back over what we've done.
It's very concise, it's tight, it's well-structured.
Orality in its nature, it's ephemeral,
it disappears on us, it can't be well structured.
It's sort of rambling and repetitive and that's what orality is like.
So one thing we want to do is say the grammar of orality and
the grammar of literacy are very, very different from each other.
As different as the other modes which I'm going to speak about in a second.
And in fact that's why in some senses orality is close to audio.
And in some senses written is close to visual.
And the difference is There is many similarities and
differences as there are between oral and written.
>> If we take seriously, that meaning-making happens through oral
meaning-making, through written meaning-making, visual meaning-making,
spatial, gestural, and audio, what mental language do we have for
understanding the patterns that emerge in those spaces.
We have a metalanguage for a linguistic meaning-making and we call it grammar.
But what is possible for us?
How do we enable a learner to see the relationship
between the different modes and the peculiarities within each mode?
Now the way we do it is to ask five questions
of about meaning of each of those modes.
First of all, the first question is whether it's oral or written or visual or
spatial or gestural or audio, what did the meanings refer to?
Right? What is in that space?
Secondly, we talk about how the meanings, the second question is,
how do meanings connect those interacting in the oral communication,
or the written communication, or the visual, or the special, or the gesture?
What is the interaction between those who are involved in the meaning making?
The third question is, how does the overall meaning hang together?
That is, what is the composition?
Again, whether it's oral or written, or visual or some mixture of those,
how do the components sit together in order for that meaning to be made?
And the fourth question, in what context or situations are the meaning located?
So context is very important.
Is it historical context?
Is it a science context?
Is it a physical environment?
The context really matters.
And the fifth question matters equally.
What is the purpose of the meanings and,
more importantly, whose interest do they serve?
So these five questions are questions that can be asked of each of the modes,
whether it's spoken, whether it's written,
whether it's visual, spatial, gestural, order or a mixture of those.
It allows us to come up with the patterns that enable us to understand
how something was constructed in order to have a particular impact or meaning.
>> What we do in the world now, is this extraordinary
close relationship of written and visual, and
it wasn't the case until recently that we had this close relationship.
I'm going to give a very kind of narrow technical reason as to why
these things have become closer together.
They become closer together because they can now.
So when the printing press was first invented, the technology of letter
press printing, which is basically character after character on a form, and
you build up the form and you print onto a piece of paper,
was different from the technology of lithography which is printing images.
And therefore, you might remember in old-fashioned books,
there was the section in the book which was on special paper
using lithographic printing techniques which was the plates or the pictures and
other sections of the book which were the writing.
They had to be sort of kept separate just for simple technological reasons.
Another technological example is when analog television was invented.
It wasn't that easy to put writing on the screen, the be quite frank.
It had to be done, maybe you do a title at the front.
It was a fair bit of work, and the technology of putting writing onto
the screen, and having image on the screen, that were different technologies.
And it really wasn't until digitization that it became easy and
possible to overlay screens with texts.
So television today, if you look at the sports channels or the business channels,
the news channels, a crazy amount of writing going on on those screens.
Which just wasn't feasible before.
So that world of writing and image is coming closer and
closer and closer together.
Of course on the internet look at image and text.
On social media, Twitter, Facebook look at the relationship of image and text.
They're very very close in a way that they weren't, until recently.
And in fact, a very very small interesting footnote is that this
actually started to begin, or began in the 20th century
with the invention of photo lithography and printing.
So, in other words, then it became possible to put image and
takes with photo tops sitting on to the same plate when you're printing.
So actually, some of these movement pre-dates the digital, but
the digital intensifies to the hell of a lot.
Now what a strange thing to have a subject called literacy,
where we strip out the visual.
Where we're on about just writing, okay?
And of course, when we come to do writing in history, or in social studies, or
in science, we need images.
There's something missing if you can't put in a diagram, if you can't
put in a video which illustrates what you're doing in an experiment,
in the middle of the write-up the experiment.
There's something missing if you can't put in
visual representations of data with the data.
So in other words, to be an effective communicator or an effective,
even to represent this stuff to yourself effectively these days,
these texts need to be multi-modal in which image and text are closely related.
So we've gotta change what we do in literacy.
The other modes there that we talk about is spatial.
So, that when you're in a lecture theater as opposed to having
a conversation with somebody in a cafe, these are linguistic spaces.
But the linguistic spaces which are completely framed in the form by space.
Tactile means that we're all the time, using objects.
Some other words, were, looking out a camera [LAUGH] You don't order
to use this camera, we read instructions, we move things around.
That our relationship even in terms of the media with
which we represent ourselves is that we use objects.
And, by the way, we always have.
Last few days, I read this fascinating history about the movement from
the fountain pen to the ballpoint pen and what that did for writing pedagogy.
So, in other words, these objects that we use even for representation and
communication are an integral part of our lives and
to some degree shape what it is we do and how it is that we do it.
Gestural meanings which is here I am in a video, I'm using my hands, goodness only
knows, people have paused what all this funny hand movement stuff means.
But it was always a big part of course of theater and of dance.
But gestural meanings become very important when we build videos,
when we represent stuff in video.
And that it's hard to separate our bodily personas, what we dress,
the way we appear, the way we carry ourselves, our demeanor.
Bodacious word is habitus, our kind of bodily presence in the world.
It's hard to divorce that now and in fact it's always been hard to divorce it
from the meanings we make in the world, the way in which we represent ourselves
to ourselves and the way in which we communicate with the world.
And finally, audio meanings, which is all the dings and
sounds on our computers, music, the prosody in language,
the tone in which we speak and again, very closely aligned with the world of orality.
