Technology, Literacy, Learning: A Multimodal Approach

This book sets out a framework for rethinking the three key areas of schooling that are most affected by technology's impact on education today: knowledge as curriculum, learning and pedagogy, and literacy across the curriculum. Carey Jewitt shows how all three are reshaped by the multimodal resources and facilities of new technologies, and points the way to rethinking teaching and learning in this environment.
The author proceeds practically through an exhaustive analysis of teaching and learning with technology-mediated materials such as CD-ROMs, web-sites, the internet, computer programming applications and computer games. She relates each in turn to the main curriculum topics of English, Mathematics and Science. Through this detailed scrutiny, the following questions emerge:
- How do the new technologies reshape knowledge as curriculum?
- How does the use of new technologies in the classroom reshape learning and pedagogy?
- As writing moves from page to screen, what is the impact on students' situated literary practices and how does it affect learning?
Through these questions this book demonstrates that mode, technology and curriculum knowledge are fundamentally connected, and describes how teacher and student roles in the classroom could be altered in response to new technologies. Carey Jewitt calls for a reconceptualization of literacy and reading as a "multimodal design" and demands that the need for new strategies and policies around literacy right across the board, and particularly in relation to assessment, should be seriously and urgently addressed.