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.