Technology, Multimodality and Learning

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Situating Learning in the Twenty-First Century: Technology, Policy and Meaning-Making

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 1-18

3. Analyzing Meaning across Scales

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 19-39

4. Toward a Multimodal Socio-Semiotic Account of Learning

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 41-82

5. Plan Ceibal Policy and the 1:1 Model in Uruguay

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 83-104

6. Technology and EFL across Policy Scales

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 105-135

7. Laptops and Textbooks as Curriculum Artifacts: Audience, Authorization and Ideologies in the Classroom

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 137-175

8. Learners as Sign-makers: Technology, Learning and Assessment

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 177-233

9. Conclusions

   • Germán Canale

   Pages 235-247

10. Back Matter

    Pages 249-265

    PDF

This book introduces multimodality and technology as key concepts for understanding learning in the 21st century. The author investigates how a nationwide socio-educational policy in Uruguay becomes recontextualised across time/space scales, impacting interaction and learning in an English as a Foreign Language classroom. The book introduces scalar analysis to better understand the situated and fractal nature of education policy as meaning-making, subsequently defining learning from a multimodal socio-semiotic approach. The analytical integration of different policy scales shows what policy means to various stakeholders, and what learning means for students and teachers. This depends both on how they position themselves and how they engage with the policy educational media. This innovative book will appeal to students and scholars of technology and learning, as well as multimodality.

• Multimodality
• Meaning making
• Discourse analysis
• Language Learning
• Semiotics
• technology in the classroom

“This book represents a remarkable achievement. It brings the calm of clear, principled discussion to the contemporary turbulence and cacophony of contesting voices and claims in sites of profound social, technological and pedagogic change. It confronts the inordinate complexity of practices, materials, technologies and policies by assembling a powerful, seamlessly integrated, coherent toolkit. It will serve practitioners, greatly advance theory and offer strategies for policy makers in equal measure.” (Gunther Kress, Professor of Semiotics and Education, University College London, UK)

“Germán Canale expands Halliday’s notion of “learning how to mean”, emphasizing learners’ agency as meaning-makers in new school practices of communication and learning. From a multimodal socio-semiotic approach to learning, he proposes new ways to understand semiosis as a situated practice at different scales, challenging us -educators and discourse analysts - to recognize the learning that takes place in classrooms.” (Dominique Manghi H., Profesora Escuela de Pedagogía, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile)

• Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay

  Germán Canale

Germán Canale is Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities and Education Sciences at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay.

Policies and ethics