Multimodality

As stated in the second paragraph of the article,

"Multimodality, multisemiotics, and multiliteracies emphasise the many ways and contexts in which people experience communication and come to develop understandings." As the article goes on it discusses more in depth how these different concepts do exactly this. Multimodal learning is everywhere and most of us don't even know it. In reality we are actually experiencing it all the time. School is the one place that is most obvious, where we experience these ways of learning, because of the many forms of communication that are presented in the classroom. We have lectures, readings, writings, etc which are all different forms of communicating and getting points across to students; This is exactly what multimodality is. It is the different ways of communication leading to the different understandings we take from what is being taught. 

The author himself actually speaks about how we are beginning to shift away from the traditional written and spoken words as means of communication and move in to other forms film, music, multimedia, etc. This article was especially interesting to me. Even though we are constantly living and learning in a multi modal way, we don't necessarily realize it, or at least I don;t anyways. It gave me a different out look on how many different ways there are to learn, which can defiantly make things more interesting and exciting. Rather then sticking with one way of learning all the time, there are so many other ways of communicating things to people leading them to many different understandings, which can actually be a good thing. It was really cool to me to think about how we use all our senses for communication because typically that is something you look past in everyday life. It's shocking to me all the other ways of communicating there are now (the Internet, multimedia, etc.), but I actually thing it's a good thing. I think the more ways there are of communicating, the more opportunities for people to understand what is coming from what is trying to be taught. I thought McCloud's text was rather confusing to me. A lot of it didn't really make sense to me and I think the main reason for that is that I am not one for reading comics. I was very distracted by the pictures, which interested me a lot more than what was actually being stated in the comic itself. Over all, I thought this was a very interesting article!