Inaugural Professorial Lecture: Learning and communication in digital multimodal landscapes (PDF)

An Inaugural Professorial Lecture People communicate and interact through gesture, gaze, and shifting their posture and position as well as through language. Many of the texts and artefacts people engage with in learning environments also go beyond language - a mix of image, colour, texture, movement, music, writing, and spoken word. Research that looks beyond language, though once marginalized, is increasingly recognized as essential to understanding communication and interaction, particularly in digital environments that create new challenges for - and place interesting demands on - social science research methods. In this lecture, Professor Carey Jewitt explores the educational terrain of multimodal communication and the challenges of how to research and understand it. She draws upon her work with colleagues at the Institute of Education and beyond, and demonstrates the potential of attending to the unspoken as much as to the spoken in helping understand communication and learning in the changing digital landscape. The author shows how design and use of technologies has a key role in communication and learning, and how their use can shape practices and potentials and change resources. Finally, she points towards the ways in which, through the use of technologies, teachers and students have access to different semiotic resources, and how their situated use of these resources shapes learning. Carey Jewitt is Professor of Technology and Learning at the Institute of Education, University of London, and heads the institute's Culture, Communication and Media Department.