Multiliteracies in practice

One thing brought up in the handout by Dr. Bomer is very interesting. He mentions that everyone has a “limited supply of attention” and each individual has to plan where and how to use it. Because of the easy access to information, one is likely to be overwhelmed by all types of information available and be distracted from what he/she really wants to focus on in the first place. Spending too much time on reading unrelated information while searching for the necessary information may be my personal itch. Time fleets away like a flash, and nothing big has accomplished.
My attention span has become so short that I couldn’t focus on one single text at a time. The way the information spread out through the Internet has changed the reading habits of people. In the old times, people do not need to pay effort to focus on one single piece of information since they tend to get access to one thing at a time. When too much information is available, one will need to manage his/her time and attention to screen superfluous information and spot pivotal elements.

In the article “A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures,” the New London Group addresses that the trend of civic pluralism fosters the change of the content of public rights and pedagogical orientation of literacy. Cultural and linguistic diversity was no longer viewed as “abnormal” or “non-standard,” but was valued as powerful social resources for students who may equip themselves for multicultural niche markets in the future. This reminds me of the issue of accent that has been brought up constantly in recent years. When learning a foreign language, most people tend to believe that only when individuals who can speak a language without an accent are good learners or speakers of that language. “Without an accent” here I refer to an accent of a target language influenced by a speaker’s native language. Take English as an international language for example. There are an immense number of people speaking this language and, for those who learn English as a second or foreign language; their native tone would more or less affect their accent. The nonnative accent used to be viewed as a stigma, while in the New World, some people, especially humanity researchers and ethnographers, start to advocate the concept of accent as a representation of personal or ethical identity and idiosyncrasy. However, we need to be cautious that the new concept may fall into the category of tokenistic pluralism and people having nonnative accents still have difficulty in being recognized.

Reflection on "Rereading the signs"

Siegel (2006)’s article points out the important role technology plays in combining threads of literacy practices and development. New context and purpose have been created through the use of technology, and in turn, new notion of authorship and publishing are blooming. Multimodal transformations of literacy has made linear representation of texts become more interactive and reader-friendly. An emergent path of literacy value the symbol systems, emphasizing the importance of sign-making and sign-reading in a variety of modes. This reminds me of my writing class in elementary school. Each student got a writing notebook with a blank column on the top of the page and lines at the bottom of the pages. The teacher always encouraged us to draw something first on the blank part of the notebook, and based on the drawings, we could tell our own stories in written language. The drawing images, compared to texts, are more concrete, which enable little kids to develop their ideas with little constraints of their literacy proficiency. In middle schools and high schools, the multimodal literate behaviors were no longer valued by school teachers. Most of the time, students were asked to write on a topic given by teacher without any visual or audio support. First of all, it may be difficult for students to interpret the topic itself. In the same vein, students were only allowed to express themselves through conventional text system and be evaluated in the same mode, which privileges written language above all other symbol systems and indirectly limit students’ development to only adult-defined literacy.

Literacy in multimodal environments

When the notions of habits of mind and the ubiquitous use of PowerPoint are brought up together, I immediately thought of a friend who likes to use PowerPoint to take notes, structure his ideas, ask questions, and answer his own questions. It doesn’t make sense to me in the first place. However, after reading Adams (2006)’ article, I suddenly figure out that PowerPoint is not simply a software people could use for presentation purposes, but can be used for concept construction and note-taking. According to Adams, the blank default slides invite authors to think of a title, and add information in a bulleted format. The process of creating the slides simulates a series of steps involved to plot the mental image and develop cognitive knowledge. Furthermore, the software allows people to brainstorm in a default framework, providing a sense of security for people who have little ideas about how to get started. The invention of PowerPoint also reminds me of the writing technology exhibition in Harry Ransom center earlier. Several brainstorming sentences were written on the radii of a circle-shape paper. In the same vein, the circle shaped paper creates a structure and format for authors who could fill in the space provided.

I was also intrigued by the idea of significant insignificance. Adams (2006) points out that the use of bullet tool makes the representation of all information signified, and in turn, makes relative significance indistinctive. Knowledge presented in bulleted format is inclined to be embedded several layers deep and homogenized. Also, in order to incorporate the content into the pre-set PowerPoint framework, certain unimportant information inevitably need to be stressed to complete the overall picture. My experience of making slides echoes this point. I need to think about giving a title of every text, and add extraneous information to fill in the blank space of slides even though there is only one point worth mentioning. Another pitfall of slides is that information needs to be displayed on a single projected 4:3 rectangle. It is unlikely to employ complex table or graph for they requires more space. Authors would inexorably suffer information loss or information split.

When reading about the IM article, Lewis (2005) mentioned about people would have to “sound” right in writing. Because they couldn’t see each other, they would adopt some emoticons during the conversation or some expressions such as “lol” or capitalize every words for the purpose of emphasizing. People sometimes would use “iirc (if I recall it correctly)” or “btw (by the way) to save some typing labor. Posing occurs a lot given a social sphere excludes the body. My friend Jasmine logged on her boy friend’s account and send instant messages to every girl on his body list in order to find out whether her boy friend was cheating on her. In terms of language learning, the enactment of multiple identities through the use of online chatting allows students learning a foreign language to interact with native speakers of target language with fewer barriers. First of all, they could practice the language without take the pressure of face-to-face communication. Similarly, the chances of being discriminated become fewer. Second, the instant message provides students more reaction time than real-life communication. They can sound “smart and sophisticated” even though they are not fluent speakers since they can get access to information they need online before they actually type the sentences. IM demands people who can draw on the intertextual chains that exist through the textual history of each interaction in a larger textual network (New London Group, 1996, 2000). When one is not able to shift his or her performance instantaneously from one audience to another, he or she would have problem carrying conversations with people.