A Little Take-Away from "The Future of Literacy"

The world seen through images is nothing like the world narrated through writing. The evolving dominance of writing to the dominance of image in the various domains of the world is one that is still debatable today. Much of what is discussed by Kress in this week's reading led me to conclude that the integration of writing and image is still the best be in communicating meaning. The way writing (text in its conventional definition) and image (still and what is prevalent today, moving images/videos) support each other produces the potential for viewers/readers to make meaning. This meaning making process however situates one in the domain of their social context.

For example, the following video by National Council of Problem Gambling (Singapore) takes on the perspective a father.

Just by viewing the moving images before reading the text (writing) at the end of the video, one who lacks the social context or prior knowledge will not be able to decipher the intended meaning that the image maker is trying to communicate because the semiotic potential of images are such that it is open to interpretation and that the reader has the authority to hypothesise the content. The text at the end of the video, "Often people who suffer from problem gambling aren't the gamblers", however, demands the reader to make an epistemological commitment to it in which readers are forced to attribute those who are not gamblers as suffers of problem gambling. Independently, the text and image produce different effects on readers.

Hence, this video illustrates why I feel that integration of writing and image is the best bet when one seeks semiotic potential because when both writing and image co-exist, people are able to contextualise and make a more accurate meaning of what the image maker is trying to deliver. On a hindsight, as much as one can imagine from the text who are the ones sufferings, the affordance of an image has limited it to the daughter of a father who is in need of her piggy bank's money. Thus, here I concur that both modes, writing and image, have their strengths and limitations as mentioned in Kress (p.4) and that the meaning maker (text maker), when designing their products, will have to carefully approximate the reader's interpretation.

Dominance of image or more evidently, a visual spectrum of meaning making potential calls for an urgent restructuring of today's education system. Learning about the changes in Singapore's English curriculumn (2010) which caters to the skills of visualising and representing signals the government's recognition of the changing world. As mentioned in the NLG reading earlier this semester, we have to indeed prepare our children for tomorrow's worl where reading images is prevalent. However, cultural pessimists, the political and cultural elites, as suggested by Kress seem reluctant to make the switch. Writing seem to still be their domincant mode of communication despite the evolving dominance. Honestly, I agree with their stance to a certain extent simply because some issues in the world today are best preserved in writing. For example, Memorandum of Understandings, asset deeds and etc...However, a little thought in me was wondering would it be possible to integrate images in these "serious documents"? Will image lower the modalityof the writer's intention. Imagine a warrant of arrest or summons being integrated or designed with images that exemplifies the text maker's intention. How bizzare~

Well, at the end of the day, I believe that texts which are designed on a multimodal platform, whether aimed as fitness for purpose, shaping of knowledge, epistemological commitments or causality, are capable of affording as many potential meanings as readers possibly can interpret because mode is inseparable from cultural, social, affective and cognitive matters.

Of Semiotic Resources and Typographies

Semiotic Resources
This week's reading helped me to finally come to an understanding of what ‘affordance’ or ‘semiotic potential’ mean. It leads me to conclude that anything at all: words, objects, images and gestures, as soon as it is deemed as a semiotic resource, can be interpreted or in this case afford different kinds of interpretations or meanings and thus the semiotic potential can be described. However, one has to note that as much as an artefact’s semiotic potential can be described, it is still fixed to the context in which it is situated. For example, in the following:

Without the context, this image can be interpreted as a juggler, a person balancing many responsibilities which are equally important, a person who is about to cover protect his head from falling balls and etc...

The interpretations I have listed above are possible description of the image’s potential. My point here is that this image’s affordance is limitless and for semioticians to be able to describe all of its potential is impossible. To realise the true meaning of the image, it has to be tied to where and how this image is used in other words, the image has to be contextualised.

The inventory of semiotic potential is non-exhaustive as chances are; the potential is defined for a specific purpose in which affordance of the resource in other domains could be neglected.

In my humble opinion, the work of semioticians in building and gathering semiotic inventories is formidable and tedious. The examples cited in the readings singlehandedly emphasises the never ending affordances of semiotic resources. The notion of “framing”, categorised by its use in magazine advertisements and school and office buildings, suggest how domains dictates which affordances is highlighted or obscured.

Typographies

With reference to the image below, it is clear that typography is no longer representative of a print text that delivers information directly from the writer. Instead, it communicates one’s sense of identity and personality to a certain extent.

This advert, designed by Career Junction (Middle East), targets people to put their skills to better use. Skills here refer to possibly the ability of a designer to innovate the conventional print in grocery list to a “typographical image”. Thus, looking at it, one may observe how conventional typefaces communicates or screams out the respective denoting images that it represents. It is really interesting to note that typographies today are pretty much a form of semiotic resource with its own pool of affordances. I bet there are many conventional things out there that we may have taken for granted awaiting their turn to be innovated.

Beyond “Flowerness”

When one speaks of salience, the white spider lilies are no doubt the most salient as it not only forms the foreground of the picture; it is also the sharpest represented participant as opposed to the blurred background. The very fact that it is salient allows viewers to interpret the semiotic potential of the spider lilies that goes beyond the denotation of flowerness.

From what I know of spider lilies, it can be found almost everywhere in Singapore as a decorative plant by pathways or surrounding institutions or buildings. It is hardy and blooms for a short period of time of over 2-3 weeks and withers soon after. Despite its short blooming span, the abundance of these lilies continues to beautify the surrounding consistently replacing the withering ones.

Thus, with that prior knowledge, one possible meaning potential that the image can afford would be how these white spider lilies could be the semblance of love. Tough love to be precise where realistically in relationships between a man and his wife, arguments, that might wither the love, are no strangers to the relationship. At the same time, the cycle of withering and blooming like that of spider lilies metaphorically represent how love withers and blooms.

The white petals signify purity and thus show how love is at its purest when it is blooming. However, at the same time, the petals seem to be drooping down rather than bloom upright like a rose. With reference to this week's reading, van Leeuwen mentioned that metaphors highlight some aspects and repress others, thus indicating what is important for the purpose of the given context. Hence, in this case, I truly wonder what aspect of 'love' is repressed and whether this repression actually uncovers the connotation of love that lies within the spider lily.

“Literacy in Three Metaphors” by Scribner

What does it take for one to be literate today? Is it any different from the world I grew up in then? 20 years ago was the first time I entered school. Was I not literate before I entered school? It is interesting to read and note that the big names in the academic world are still debating about how literacy is to be defined. Yes, it encompasses many parameters in which some might be contradicting the other. However, when we bring this reading down to Singapore's educational context, I would pick Literacy as Adaptation as our guiding beacon in the EL curriculum.

Reason being, the Ministry had picked and chosen what is important to be covered by which level in accordance to our context. The genre approach in which our curriculum takes on suggests that the Ministry has carefully selected what is necessary for us to function in society. As years progress, Singapore's EL curriculum changes too. These changes, I believe, is made to better cater to the future world in which our children will grow in. Here, the notion of literacy as adaptation stands strong simply because whatever that makes us literate as an individual is dependent on how our society has changed.

Back in primary school, we learnt how to merely write letters and its various degree of formality. Now, pupils learn how to write emails, a convention similar to letters, however differ in terms of immediacy and its capability to tap on various designs of meaning making. Presentations in class back then comprise of mounting boards and construction papers while now pupils can tap on PowerPoint or even Flash animations to deliver their ideas. Schools now have to evolve, and driven by the new curriculum, equip pupils with these literacy skills so as to ensure their relevance in tomorrow's world.

Comment on “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies”

I have read this article twice, once in ASE 401 and now in AAE 439. Honestly, I do not quite get some parts. However, here is what I understood so far from the NLG article. We know that NLG had generally viewed the mission of education as to “ensure students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to be able to participate fully in public community and economic life”. Hence, in my opinion, to allow the mission to be met, education now has to mirror the all-encompassing and integrated environmental prints and information-delivering medium that is multifaceted in nature.

Bringing this issue to close to home, the following excerpt of an article I found online, though dated back to 2006, suggest how media and even business platform has evolved.

"If we recast old media into this model, traditional print media encompasses the following: newspaper, journals, magazines, radio and TV. To be fair, the old media industry has now consolidated into large corporations and the management have a very strong control towards what gets transmitted to the people. The new media revolutionized by the birth of the internet, is now championed by the world wide web and open source ideals of sharing information, ... which basically invoke the technologies of blogging, podcasting and video-casting... A few years ago, when Amazon first came to being, the traditional bookstores were threatened. In the end, the traditional bookstores set up their homepages which also catered to selling books online. Actually, some of them have now worked with Amazon to merge into similar services. ..Yet, the new media issue is more complex, because it relates to the freedom of speech and expression. Citizen journalism has transformed the way how large corporations sought to control the media to their own purpose. A good case study in our local community is the STOMP."

(Source: http://sgentrepreneurs.com/marketing-branding/2006/06/15/new-media-vs-old-media/ )

Based on Amazon and the new media issue cited above, I would imagine that when one speaks of Multiliteracies Pedagogy, I would picture a classroom that is filled with computers (working ones, of course) and pupils participating in online discussions through forums to share and gain ideas with the purpose of probably completing a presentation on a recent unit. As the classroom teacher of this language classroom, it is my duty to encourage pupils to explore and not constraint themselves to being monocultural, formalised and restricted to rule-governed forms of language simply because of the way different aspects of how unconventional information is represented today. The complexity and freedom of today’s world in terms of representing ideas and information publicly or economically seeks for teachers to infuse these aspects in their lessons so that students will not only be prepared but also remain relevant in today’s world where in the case of the article, the world that our children will grow up to would be one where they have the power to manipulate and be in charge of how information would appear to the world by redesigning what they know.

At the end of the day, equipping students with the skills to integrate, represent and view the diverse form of media, and simultaneously realise the affordances of each type of design element and its impact on how to deliver their intention or purpose in the assigned task is essential. Teaching them (Intertextuality) the different mode of meaning (design elements) and its potential also gives students the opportunities to not only understand what they see today, but also aids them in representing their ideas/information similarly in today’s complexity. This is what the pedagogy of Multiliteracies means to me.

Test/First Post

Found a decent template alas... (= Indeed, this is the beginning of my first blogspot address in my life. Tried blogging in the past using other domains however I would call my then attempts 'rantings' rather than 'blogging'.

Hope this time round, like what Wani said in her blog, would contain substantial entries!