Sonia Estima

Multimodality

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Our society today is increasingly becoming more global and individuals are increasingly inter-connected with ever expanding ways of communicating with each other.  Communication in turn, is increasingly shaped by these new technologies and the multiplicity of ways for interacting with and deriving meaning from the environment and the resources around us. New aspects of communication are emerging from new ways of dealing with text, image, action, and sound. These new advances in technology have a profound implications for education and how people learn and communicate in general.

The ubiquitous nature of technology and mobile devices in everyday life, is changing how people interact with the world around them; and it is driving a dramatic transformation of how we learn and communicate.  We see a slow and gradual move away from the dominance of the printed text, and writing to the new dominance of images and digital formats; and the move from the dominance of the medium of the book to the dominance of the medium of the screen (Jewitt, 2008). These shifts are in turn calling for a review of traditional pedagogies to new ways of relating to information and associated means for representing and communicating at every level and in every domain.  This work will examine the importance and impact of multimodality for learning and knowledge making.