Do what we do: a multimodal approach to planning and teaching

Quality teaching and learning in teacher education can be enriched across campuses for both the academics and the student bodies when focus is given to the development of dynamic ICT rich learning experiences. This paper focuses on the learning journey of two academics and their preservice teacher education students located on two regional campuses, 200km apart, and how planning, communicating, implementing, presenting, evaluating, and reflecting took place within a framework of collegiality. The unit, entitled, ‘The Literacy Teacher, the Profession and the Community’ was a final year unit within the undergraduate Bachelor of Education program. Specifically this paper discusses how a multimodal teaching and learning environment using a range of new communication technologies enhanced the both the teaching and the learning experience for our pre-service teacher education students.

Creativity as capital in the literacy classroom: youth as multimodal designers

Many school literacy practices ignore adolescents' new digitally mediated subjectivity as it has been shaped by the new media age. Youth possess often unappreciated repertories of practice which allow them to use their imagination and creativity to combine print, visual and digital modes in combinations that can be applied to new educational, civic, media and workplace contexts. This paper reports on research in two middle years classrooms in New York City's Chinatown, where students' design skills were recognised and validated when they were encouraged to critically re-represent curricular knowledge through multimodal design. The curriculum, rather than privileging print-only representations, recognised the linguistic, social, economic and cultural capital that different students brought to school. The findings suggest schools should harness youths' creativity – that often manifests itself through their capital resources – as they integrate and adapt to the new digital affordances acquired through their out-of-school literacy practices.

Literacy in the new media age: creativity as multimodal design

Much of the current discourse of adolescence is best described as emblematic of modernity, as colonial, as gendered, and as administrative (Lesko, 2001) working to maintain “progressive” school literacy practices that ignore adolescents’ new “cyber-techno subjectivity” (Luke & Luke, 2001) and creativity in the “new media age” (Kress, 2003). School curricula often do not acknowledge the range of skills adolescents acquire outside formal education. Youths’ new multimodal social and cultural practices—as they fashion themselves creatively in multiple modes as different kinds of people in “New Times” (Luke, 1998)— oints to the liberating power of new technologies that embrace their imagination and creativity. In two middle years classes, adolescents’ creativity was recognised and validated when they were encouraged to re-represent curricular knowledge through multimodal design (New London Group, 1996). The results suggest the changed classroom habitus (Bourdieu, 1980) produced new and emergent discursive and material practices where creativity, through imaginative collaboration, emerges as capital in an economy of practice (Bourdieu, 1996). The findings suggest schools should recognize adolescents’ creativity—that often manifests itself through their cultural and social capital resources—as they integrate and adapt to the new affordances acquired through their out-of-school literacy practices.

Girls challenging patriarchy through multimodal design and participation in online communities of practice.

This paper examines adolescent girls' multimodal design that challenges/resists patriarchy. Acts of uploading and multimodal design are discussed in terms of Bulter's theorisation of discursive performativity. The author suggests the girls employ a form of 'linguistic agency' or 'discursive agency' that allows them to make use of a wide range of multimodal design practices often unavailable in print dominated middle years classrooms. The girls in the study were involved in a set of relationships over time, both inside and outside of school in virtual and real time communities of practice. As a result, they engaged with particular areas of curricular knowledge differently than boys. The findings suggest that within online communities of practice, new contexts emerge where adolescent girls can contest the discourses of patriarchal power.

An algebraic framework for multimodal image fusion

This thesis presents an algebraic framework for multimodal image fusion. The framework derives algebraic constructs and equations that govern the fusion process. The derived equations serve as objective functions according to which image fusion algorithms and metrics can be tuned. The equations also prove the duality between image fusion algorithms and metrics.

Simultaneously enhanced strength and ductility of titanium via multimodal grain structure

Commercial Ti with a multimodal grain structure was successfully produced using cryorolling, followed by low-temperature annealing. This multimodal grain structure Ti exhibited a combination of high yield strength (926 MPa), a uniform elongation of 11% and a failure elongation of 23%. The strength enhancement was mainly derived from the ultrafine equiaxed grains, while the improved ductility originated from the large fraction of high-angle grain boundaries and the multimodal grain structure.

Creating multimodal metalanguage with teachers

Curriculum guidelines, including the emergent Australian curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2009-10), indicate expectations that teachers will support their students’ interpretation and creation of multimodal texts. However, English curriculum guidelines are yet to advise on a detailed metalanguage to support teacher and student discussion of the meaning-making dimensions of multimodal texts. Theoretical work on the development of multimodal metalanguage is in its early stages, lacking ready application for use in diverse classroom contexts. This article reports on research into applications of a framework designed to help teachers add depth and breadth to teaching and learning about multimodal meanings through development of a metalanguage (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). While application of this framework in middle-years classrooms was initially found to be problematic, working in collaboration with teachers this framework was adapted and enriched for classroom use. This resulted in a refined framework which can be used in classrooms for stimulating metalanguage to describe multimodal texts.

Multimodal synthesis and the voice of the multimedia author in a Japanese EFL context

This paper examines a powerful potential of multimodal design: meaning that transcends the total semiotic contribution of a text's constituent parts. With reference to data drawn from the digital storytelling practices of Japanese university students, the author argues and demonstrates that in the current semiotic climate, characterised by the increasing availability and complexity of communication tools and ready appropriation of available designs, practices of multimedia authorship truly can evince expression that is authentically multiplicative. However, this sort of meaning making does not automatically come about. Controlling the inherent polysemy of multimodal texts, in the author's view, is a matter of recognising points of semantic correspondence among co-deployed images, language, etc. and creating syntheses of potential meaning that cut across these semiotic modes. The author further argues that it is in this way that the voice of the multimodal author can most clearly be heard, particularly in cases in which a language learner–author integrates elements within a multimedia text that encode meaning in the L2.