Miscellaneous multimodal jiggery pokery

EDC multimodality assignments

• James Mackay's essay on multimodality from EDC2012. From what I gather, Sian holds this in high regard, although I haven't looked through it myself yet: http://online.education.ed.ac.uk/gallery/mackay_multimodal/
• Another EDC assignment, this time from 2009: http://www.sarahpayne.co.uk/Maze.html

History of scholarship and print references from Sian:

• Ong, W. J. (1982) Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, New York: Methuen.
  
• Lebvre, L. and Martin, H.-J. (1976) The coming of the book: the impact of printing 1450-1800, London: Verso.
  
• Bolter, J. D. (2001) Writing space: computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  
• Eisenstein, E. (1980) The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  

Some of my rambling thoughts contesting the newness of multimodality and the the suggestion that it deprivileges writing as the mode that matters:

Multimodality within evolving scholarship (from draft lit review)
The focus on how hypertext essays, visually-rich artefacts and other emerging forms of composition are different from their proposed essayistic predecessors is simultaneously helpful and misleading. They are valuable in encouraging us to reflect on the dynamic nature of literacy and communication within the academy, however they offer a false impression of the historical and contemporary ubiquitousness of the traditional essay. If we walk the corridors of the university and peer into the laboratories, performance spaces and tutorial rooms we will observe students of music, drama, mathematics, physical sciences and other disciplines participating in assessment exercises where ideas, knowledge and ability are already being demonstrated without calling for the power of the written word (or to a much lesser extent than we might understand from some of the literature). We evidently need to avoid framing multimodality in term of how it differs from an essayistic approach when the written word is by no means ubiquitous as the sole means of representation within the academy. Or to put it another, multimodality cannot be seen to deprivelige the essay in disciplines where it does not already hold sway.

In his influential study of the relationship between orality and literacy, Ong (1982) describes how the roots of academic tradition within western civilization saw Greek scholars listen to speeches before going on to study the transcripts of what had been said. Elsewhere [bit here oral assessment being the original method of testing in the university].

The comparisons between digital and traditional approaches to composition can also be seen as misleading as they encourage us to think in terms of new and old media, with the advent of digital communication technology as a threshold point that represents the birth of multimodality. Just as discourse surrounding multimodality is heavily influenced by work published in the pre-digital era, including Halliday’s work on semiotics (1978,1985) and Gibson’s work on affordances (1977), the representation of ideas across modes pre-dates the digital era. Jewitt (2006) makes a vital point when she reminds us that although the multimodal label may be a contemporary creation, print-based reading and writing have always been multimodal and instead invites us to see multimodality as blending new and old technologies (2005). Once again, Ong’s work on the history of scholarship and literacy is valuable in demonstrating that books and images – what we might describe as pre-digital multimodal artefacts – have formed the basis for education and learning for centuries (citation). More recently, in their comparison of pre- and post-digital science textbooks, Bezemer and Kress (2008) recognise that the use of image alongside explanatory written text is a tradition that pre-dates current discussion of multimodality.

Once again there is value in applying these ideas to assessment practices taking place within the academy. If we continue our walk through the university we might visit the art school or design studio where we can observe an Intermedia student using a communicative collage of orality, visuality and body language to present her ideas within the ‘crit review’ exercise. The simultaneous representation of ideas across a range of modes predates the digital era and need not be the product of digital communication.

Scolari (2009) adds to this discussion by question the efficacy of regular references to ‘new media’ within the literature. In his work on mapping conversations about digital media, he suggests that ‘new media’ can only ever be a relative term, and asks at which point we should refer to a weblog as ‘old media’? Clearly, the written word has never been the sole mode that matters within the academy and we need to avoid thinking in terms of old and new modes. Rather than conceptualitising digital multimodality as causing a seismic shift in literacy that destabilises written language, we should see it as the continuing evolution of how ideas and knowledge are communicated within the academy.