Like what was discussed in class, "The affordances of new technologies reconfigure the multimodal aspects of reading and writing in ways that are newly significant for reading." As we can see, writing's functional load has since shifted quite a fair bit since the advancement of technology, which allowed the visual mode to 'take over' writing. This shows the decentring of writing as its role on the screen changed from a dominant role to a 'supporting role' as mentioned by Alen.

As for writing as a label or caption, it is clearly shown in this website that I am going to introduce to all of you --> Roald Dahl's Official website

The main page of the website includes a combination of a 'hand written' font type and another font type which seems to be the usual font type used in Roald Dahl books. The use of the hand written font marks the 'presence' or 'essence' of a human writer, as mentioned by Jewitt and it seems to suggest a close relationship with its audience, especially because it appears to be physically hand written by a hand right at the start when the website is loaded. In this case, its audience is being connected to the author, Roald Dahl, throughout the website as each page's title/label is being 'hand written' by a hand everytime the pages load. Moreover, the connectedness with its audience is further enhanced through the scribbling sound made when the hand writes on the labels.

Something I would like to note is the relations of coherence in the main page. The initial quizzical music that was played when the page loads, the animated 'paper cutout' characters (that looks like the characters in Roald Dahl's stories) and the random animals and boy that appear every now and then, seem to all reinforce the 'fantasy comes alive' theme that Roald Dahl instills in his own stories. Like what Jewitt says, such a "realisation of the same theme simultaneously through a range of modes, makes the theme more salient than it would be of it were only realised in one mode."

Upon clicking on the hyperlink, "Roald Dahl", I was led to a page where 6 sub links popped out and I clicked on "An interview with Roald Dahl". In this section, I was able to click on the random numbers on the left which represents the different interviews that I can view and listen to.

Upon clicking on Interview 4, I can immediately hear Roald Dahl's voice talking about the question posed to him. His audio interview is accompanied by a written version in the white space on the right. Personally, I was more drawn to the audio version of the interview rather than the written form as I felt as if I was present during his interview and was more closely connected to Roald Dahl. Such use of audio in this case encourages new potentials for engagement of its audience, especially the younger crowd.

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As with my brief analysis above, we can see that such a multimodal website like this uses all the various modes to "convey multiple meanings and allows its audience to reject a single interpretation and to hold possible multiple readings of a text" (Coles and Hall, 2001) through taking multiple reading paths. Every time when I enter the website, I may not always go through the same reading path. Instead, I may make/remake new meanings as there is no linear route to reading.

9:55 AM

From Stein's article, I understand that we as teachers should embrace multimodal pedagogies in an effort to broaden up the range of representation modes in our classroom. By opening ourselves up to accept other modes of representations, we will be able to accommodate socially and/or culturally disadvantaged pupils who may not have access to the privileged modes like spoken and written forms. Pupils can then be empowered with the freedom to construct and represent their 'voice'.

This forms the basis of Stein's six main assumptions of multiliteracies, which are as follows:

In Point 5, Stein suggests that language is limited to what can be represented. Sometimes, certain emotions or human experience may not be aptly expressed through language, which brings me to the silent movies that came about in the 18th century, where body language and facial expression were used to portray the actors' feelings and emotions to the audience.

Due to this assumed limited role that language alone plays in meaning making, meaning making should be multimodal (Point 3), which means making use of the various materiality of modes (time/space-based modes).

Such modes are usually thought of by me as referring to texts and visuals. But I am ignoring a very important mode, which is our bodies (Point 2). Our bodies have "a wide range of means of engagement with the world," (Kress, 2000c, p.184 in Stein, 2004) which makes it a good site of multimodal resources that allows us to express meanings that may not be possible with other modes. Our body has the ability to hold language and silence, therefore, I will show a video on how the actors in silent films as mentioned earlier convey meanings in bodily and sensory ways.



Also, I found the following video to illustrate how silence and the action of lighting a candle captures people's attention and invoke their emotions on the issue of AIDS (which is said to be unspeakable in certain contexts). Language in this case, comes right at the end only to complement the message. In my opinion, the texts that come out at the end symbolises the breaking of silence of the AIDS issue by the Western-dominated media.

10:57 PM

After reading Hull & Vasudevan's articles, I was immediately pulled into the idea of authoring my new identity, probably another side of me that is not known to my NIE friends. I did it through a simple slide show of some pictures which I used to represent myself, my life and some thoughts that went through my head before. I used a multimodal approach by combining visuals, texts (some are in the form of taglines that appear when you mouseover the pictures) and music.

In a way, I am 'counterstorytelling' to depict some reality about myself to challenge others who may construct a different reality of me. Such a way of expressing myself gives me a 'voice' and I am inevitably making myself heard/known to others, something I might not be able to achieve on my own. As Vasudevan (2006) mentioned, I want to be known for who I am, not for who I ain't and I want to re(claim) my right to author myself into new narratives.

*Please note that the song has been made to not play automatically, so when you watch the slideshow, do click on the audio icon at the top left corner to play the song*


I have given a very simple example of how our students can be given a chance to express themselves in this digital age, where "forms and practices of communication and representation are crucial in our new times" (Hull, 2003). This slide show provides an avenue for younger children who may not be as IT savvy, to start off by uploading pictures that says things about themselves. Although there may be restrictions by using slide shows, but I feel that it makes a good starting point for them.

8:38 AM