The textbook in a changing multimodal landscape

In this chapter we explore communication and learning in the contem-porary social world. Taking the textbook as a ‘case study’ we identify changes in multimodal text making – in the use of writing, image, layout and typography – and highlight their social pedagogic significance. The theoretical frame of our account is Social Semiotics. Drawing on a corpus of English, Science and Maths textbooks and digital learning resources published between 1930 and now we render visible pro-found shifts in the semiotic landscape of education. Teachers and designers of lear-ning resources have always drawn on a range of different ‘modes’ – writing and image foremost among them, yet a combination of social change and new technologies has given rise to the possibilities for an increase in the use of more modes than these, in new ‘ensembles’ of modes, and with differently distributed functions. The chapter explores what the implications of these changes are for what and how students learn. We begin the chapter by outlining the aims and background of the study, our social semiotic theoretical framework and the data and methods used. Following that we discuss changes in the modes of writing, image, typography and layout in textbooks from different eras, and explore the use of moving and dynamic image and speech in online learning resources

Semiotic work in the science classroom

This review is on Lilian Pozzer and Wolff-Michael Roth’s “A cultural-historical perspective on the multimodal development of concepts in science lectures.” We offer some brief observations from within the paradigm of social semiotics, more specifically from our own attempts to produce multimodal accounts of learning in and beyond the classroom. We propose to treat meaning as the outcome of social action and interaction: clearly, environments and practices of learning and teaching come within that frame. We comment on the categories and implicit distinctions of verbal vs nonverbal, and the relative visibility and invisibility of meaning makers (teacher and learner) and their use of semiotic resources in accounts of learning. We highlight the agency of learners and propose a transformation of the role of “teacher” into that of “designer (of learning environments)”. We conclude by briefly speculating on the possibility of bringing the two distinct paradigms into dialogue and conjunction

Neuropsychiatric and other side effects of peginterferon-based therapy of chronic hepatitis C infection

The Hepatitis C virus (HCV) was identified in 1989, after extensive research, as a cause of the so-called non-A non-B hepatitis. HCV is an RNA virus belonging to the genus Hepacivirus in the family of Flaviviridae. Six major different genotypes of the virus are discerned. HCV is transmitted via blood-blood contact, and consequently, the majority of HCV patients in western countries are infected by the intravenous use of drugs or by receiving blood transfusion before 1992, the year when screening tests became available. World wide more than 170 million people are chronically infected with HCV. After an acute infection with HCV only about twenty percent of the people is able to clear the virus, the others become chronically infected. Of the patients with a chronic HCV infection, about 20 percent develops progressive fibrosis developing into cirrhosis, ultimately leading to end-stage liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma. Successful eradication of the virus prevents progression of the liver disease and leads to improved survival

Continuity and change: semiotic relations across multimodal texts in surgical education

In this paper we develop a social semiotic account of continuity and change across texts. Our aims are to make a theoretical contribution to scholarly work on inter-textual relations by adopting a multimodal perspective; and to develop a framework for understanding how texts mediate knowing, learning and agency in education and beyond. We achieve this through a case study of surgical education. We present and analyze, first, a collection of pedagogic texts designed for surgeons learning to perform a common surgical procedure. Second, we look at a series of texts that culminated in a pedagogic text on surgery for the general public. We conclude that a multimodal, social semiotic framework provides essential means for the recognition, documentation and understanding of continuities and changes in text production and engagement

Social Semiotics: Theorising Meaning Making

This chapter outlines a theoretical framework to account for practices of meaning making in health care and sets out an agenda for clinical educational research. It shows how meaning making pervades all aspects of clinical work and how it can be explored and made explicit within a framework derived from social semiotics. The chapter illustrates how the framework produces accounts of the ways in which clinicians make sense of and interact with the world, in situations where they give, review, and imagine care. It explores how clinicians interpret, and communicate through, human bodies, tools, and technologies, giving meaning to, and expressing meaning through, distinct material forms. In so doing, the chapter begins to render visible the semiotic skills that clinicians develop to prepare for, provide, and evaluate clinical care

Tuning stability of titania-supported Fischer-Tropsch catalysts:Impact of surface area and noble metal promotion

Cobalt oxidation is a relevant deactivation pathway of titania-supported cobalt catalysts used in Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS). To work towards more stable catalysts, we studied the effect of the surface area of the titania support and noble metal promotion on cobalt oxidation under simulated high conversion conditions. Mössbauer spectroscopy was used to follow the evolution of cobalt during reduction and FTS operation as a function of the steam pressure. The reduction of the oxidic cobalt precursor becomes more difficult due to stronger metal-support interactions when the titania surface area is increased. The reducibility was so low for cobalt on GP350 titania (surface area 283 m2/g) that the catalytical activity was negligible. Although cobalt was more difficult to reduce on P90 titania (94 m2/g) than on commonly used P25 titania (50 m2/g), the Co/P90 catalyst showed increased resistance against cobalt sintering and higher FTS performance than Co/P25. The addition of platinum to Co/P90 led to a higher reduction degree of cobalt and a higher cobalt dispersion, representing a catalyst with promising performance at relatively low steam pressure. Nevertheless, the stronger cobalt-titania interactions result in more extensive deactivation at high steam pressure due to oxidation.</p

“How many lap choles have you done?” A linguistic-ethnographic take on counting surgical experience.

In this paper we explore a site of work and learning that is rarely investigated ethnographically and to which few applied linguists have gained access: the operating theatre. Taking up the 2011 BAAL Annual Meeting’s theme, ‘The Impact of Applied Linguistics’, we argue that linguistic ethnography, through detailed analysis of situated, embodied interaction (Maybin & Tusting 2011), can and should make an important contribution to research on and improvement of the quality and safety of health care