A Review of the "Digital Turn" in the New Literacy Studies

Digital communication has transformed literacy practices and assumed great importance in the functioning of workplace, recreational, and community contexts. This article reviews a decade of empirical work of the New Literacy Studies, identifying the shift toward research of digital literacy applications. The article engages with the central theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic challenges in the tradition of New Literacy Studies, while highlighting the distinctive trends in the digital strand. It identifies common patterns across new literacy practices through cross-comparisons of ethnographic research in digital media environments. It examines ways in which this research is taking into account power and pedagogy in normative contexts of literacy learning using the new media. Recommendations are given to strengthen the links between New Literacy Studies research and literacy curriculum, assessment, and accountability in the 21st century

The digital literacy and multimodal practices of young children: engaging with emergent research: proceedings of the first Training School of COST Action IS1410, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, 6th - 8th June, 2016

CIEd - Centro de Investigação em Educação, UID/CED/01661/, Instituto de Educação, Universidade do Minho, através de fundos nacionais da FCT/MCTES-P

FrameNet annotation for multimodal corpora: devising a methodology for the semantic representation of text-image interactions in audiovisual productions

Multimodal analyses have been growing in importance within several approaches to Cognitive Linguistics and applied fields such as Natural Language Understanding. Nonetheless fine-grained semantic representations of multimodal objects are still lacking, especially in terms of integrating areas such as Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, which are key for the implementation of multimodality in Computational Linguistics. In this dissertation, we propose a methodology for extending FrameNet annotation to the multimodal domain, since FrameNet can provide fine-grained semantic representations, particularly with a database enriched by Qualia and other interframal and intraframal relations, as it is the case of FrameNet Brasil. To make FrameNet Brasil able to conduct multimodal analysis, we outlined the hypothesis that similarly to the way in which words in a sentence evoke frames and organize their elements in the syntactic locality accompanying them, visual elements in video shots may, also, evoke frames and organize their elements on the screen or work complementarily with the frame evocation patterns of the sentences narrated simultaneously to their appearance on screen, providing different profiling and perspective options for meaning construction. The corpus annotated for testing the hypothesis is composed of episodes of a Brazilian TV Travel Series critically acclaimed as an exemplar of good practices in audiovisual composition. The TV genre chosen also configures a novel experimental setting for research on integrated image and text comprehension, since, in this corpus, text is not a direct description of the image sequence but correlates with it indirectly in a myriad of ways. The dissertation also reports on an eye-tracker experiment conducted to validate the approach proposed to a text-oriented annotation. The experiment demonstrated that it is not possible to determine that text impacts gaze directly and was taken as a reinforcement to the approach of valorizing modes combination. Last, we present the Frame2 dataset, the product of the annotation task carried out for the corpus following both the methodology and guidelines proposed. The results achieved demonstrate that, at least for this TV genre but possibly also for others, a fine-grained semantic annotation tackling the diverse correlations that take place in a multimodal setting provides new perspective in multimodal comprehension modeling. Moreover, multimodal annotation also enriches the development of FrameNets, to the extent that correlations found between modalities can attest the modeling choices made by those building frame-based resources.Análises multimodais vêm crescendo em importância em várias abordagens da Linguística Cognitiva e em diversas áreas de aplicação, como o da Compreensão de Linguagem Natural. No entanto, há significativa carência de representações semânticas refinadas de objetos multimodais, especialmente em termos de integração de áreas como Processamento de Linguagem Natural e Visão Computacional, que são fundamentais para a implementação de multimodalidade no campo da Linguística Computacional. Nesta tese, propomos uma metodologia para estender o método de anotação da FrameNet ao domínio multimodal, uma vez que a FrameNet pode fornecer representações semânticas refinadas, particularmente com um banco de dados enriquecido por Qualia e outras relações interframe e intraframe, como é o caso do FrameNet Brasil. Para tornar a FrameNet Brasil capaz de realizar análises multimodais, delineamos a hipótese de que, assim como as palavras em uma frase evocam frames e organizam seus elementos na localidade sintática que os acompanha, os elementos visuais nos planos de vídeo também podem evocar frames e organizar seus elementos na tela ou trabalhar de forma complementar aos padrões de evocação de frames das sentenças narradas simultaneamente ao seu aparecimento na tela, proporcionando diferentes perfis e opções de perspectiva para a construção de sentido. O corpus anotado para testar a hipótese é composto por episódios de um programa televisivo de viagens brasileiro aclamado pela crítica como um exemplo de boas práticas em composição audiovisual. O gênero televisivo escolhido também configura um novo conjunto experimental para a pesquisa em imagem integrada e compreensão textual, uma vez que, neste corpus, o texto não é uma descrição direta da sequência de imagens, mas se correlaciona com ela indiretamente em uma miríade de formas diversa. A Tese também relata um experimento de rastreamento ocular realizado para validar a abordagem proposta para uma anotação orientada por texto. O experimento demonstrou que não é possível determinar que o texto impacta diretamente o direcionamento do olhar e foi tomado como um reforço para a abordagem de valorização da combinação de modos. Por fim, apresentamos o conjunto de dados Frame2, produto da tarefa de anotação realizada para o corpus seguindo a metodologia e as diretrizes propostas. Os resultados obtidos demonstram que, pelo menos para esse gênero de TV, mas possivelmente também para outros, uma anotação semântica refinada que aborde as diversas correlações que ocorrem em um ambiente multimodal oferece uma nova perspectiva na modelagem da compreensão multimodal. Além disso, a anotação multimodal também enriquece o desenvolvimento de FrameNets, na medida em que as correlações encontradas entre as modalidades podem atestar as escolhas de modelagem feitas por aqueles que criam recursos baseados em frames.CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superio

Use of visual representations and drawings in writing for arabic high school english language learners

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Constructing urban life : a study of automobile dependency in 148 mid-size U.S. cities.

Automobile-dependent sprawl remains the dominant urban development paradigm in the United States. One reason for this is that the automobile is assumed to be more beneficial to the local economy than it is detrimental to society. Both sides of this assumption are wrong. First, local economies do not benefit much from automobile dependency. On the contrary, multimodal cities have lower unemployment, higher wages for African-Americans, and more efficient property markets. In addition, while it is true that multimodality means slightly higher taxes, the total value of living in multimodal cities far surpasses automobile-dependent cities with a massively improved quality of life. Second, while automobile-dependent cities have been shown to foster obesity, the full range and intensity of automobile dependency’s health impact has been grossly understated. This research provides compelling evidence that multimodal cities not only have lower rates of obesity, but also better overall health, and significantly lower rates of premature death. Urban research has much to blame for this misunderstanding: How we look at problems largely shapes the answers we generate. By distinguishing between the independent effects of sprawl and automobile dependency, and by using municipalities themselves instead of massive urbanized regions, this research more accurately assesses the full range and depth of the benefits of transportation multimodality

Multimodal teaching, learning and training in virtual reality: a review and case study

It is becoming increasingly prevalent in digital learning research to encompass an array of different meanings, spaces, processes, and teaching strategies for discerning a global perspective on constructing the student learning experience. Multimodality is an emergent phenomenon that may influence how digital learning is designed, especially when employed in highly interactive and immersive learning environments such as Virtual Reality (VR). VR environments may aid students' efforts to be active learners through consciously attending to, and reflecting on, critique leveraging reflexivity and novel meaning-making most likely to lead to a conceptual change. This paper employs eleven industrial case-studies to highlight the application of multimodal VR-based teaching and training as a pedagogically rich strategy that may be designed, mapped and visualized through distinct VR-design elements and features. The outcomes of the use cases contribute to discern in-VR multimodal teaching as an emerging discourse that couples system design-based paradigms with embodied, situated and reflective praxis in spatial, emotional and temporal VR learning environments

Creating in a Participatory Culture: Perceptions of Digital Tools Among Teachers

The following embedded case study examines teachers’ perceptions of using digital and Web 2.0 tools for literacy instruction. These perceptions are important if teachers hope to enact a more participatory culture of creation rather than consumption called for by scholars such as the New London Group and the New Media Literacies scholars. Case study participants were teachers involved in a NWP site’s Invitational Summer Institute (ISI), with embedded cases of rural teachers in a high-poverty school district. The findings suggest teachers still face extrinsic barriers to enacting a participatory culture, and professional development is needed to help teachers effectively use digital and Web 2.0 tools in their literacy instruction

The role of edutainment in e-learning: An empirical study.

Impersonal, non-face-to-face contact and text-based interfaces, in the e-Learning segment, present major problems that are encountered by learners, since they are out on vital personal interactions and useful feedback messages, as well as on real-time information about their learning performance. This research programme suggests a multimodal, combined with an edutainment approach, which is expected to improve the communications between users and e-Learning systems. This thesis empirically investigates users’ effectiveness; efficiency and satisfaction, in order to determine the influence of edutainment, (e.g. amusing speech and facial expressions), combined with multimodal metaphors, (e.g. speech, earcon, avatar, etc.), within e-Learning environments. Besides text, speech, visual, and earcon modalities, avatars are incorporated to offer a visual and listening realm, in online learning. The methodology used for this research project comprises a literature review, as well as three experimental platforms. The initial experiment serves as a first step towards investigating the feasibility of completing all the tasks and objectives in the research project, outlined above. The remaining two experiments explore, further, the role of edutainment in enhancing e-Learning user interfaces. The overall challenge is to enhance user-interface usability; to improve the presentation of learning, in e-Learning systems; to improve user enjoyment; to enhance interactivity and learning performance; and, also, to contribute in developing guidelines for multimodal involvement, in the context of edutainment. The results of the experiments presented in this thesis show an improvement in user enjoyment, through satisfaction measurements. In the first experiment, the enjoyment level increased by 11%, in the Edutainment (E) platform, compared to the Non-edutainment (NE) interface. In the second experiment, the Game-Based Learning (GBL) interface obtained 14% greater enhancement than the Virtual Class (VC) interface and 20.85% more than the Storytelling interface; whereas, the percentage obtained by the game incorporated with avatars increased by an extra 3%, compared with the other platforms, in the third experiment. In addition, improvement in both user performance and learning retention were detected through effective and efficiency measurements. In the first experiment, there was no significant difference between mean values of time, for both conditions (E) & (NE) which were not found to be significant, when tested using T-test. In the second experiment, the time spent in condition (GBL) was higher by 7-10 seconds, than in the other conditions. In the third experiment, the mean values of the time taken by the users, in all conditions, were comparable, with an average of 22.8%. With regards to effectiveness, the findings of the first experiment showed, generally, that the mean correct answer for condition (E) was higher by 20%, than the mean for condition (NE). Users in condition (GBL) performed better than the users in the other conditions, in the second experiment. The percentage of correct answers, in the second experiment, was higher by 20% and by 34.7%, in condition (GBL), than in the (VC) and (ST), respectively. Finally, a set of empirically derived guidelines was produced for the design of usable multimodal e-Learning and edutainment interfaces.Libyan Embass