3D multimodal authoring in the Middle Years: a research project

In recent times, the phenomenal growth and spread of screen-based information sources such as video sharing, social networking, blogs, RSS feeds, search engines, web pages, wikis and a plethora of mobile communication devices offering immediate access to an extraordinary amount of online digital screen based content, has dramatically and fundamentally changed the meaning of communication in the 21st century. Within this prevailing and persuasive new media, screen-based landscape, communication is now primarily multimodal, where meaning is produced and received through combinations of different modes, broadly defined as written-linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial patterns of meaning (New London Group, 1996). Multimodal literacy, the reading and writing of multimodal texts, is essential to literacy education, now, and for the future. The draft English National Curriculum (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2010) states that: "through studying English students learn to listen, read and view, speak, write and create increasingly complex and sophisticated texts with accuracy, fluency and purpose" (p. 1, our emphasis); and 'text' is defined as written, spoken or multimodal material (Acara, 2010, p. 4). For the first time, 'creating' multimodal texts is included as a language mode alongside reading and viewing, listening and speaking, and writing. Acknowledging that writing is more than just producing print text is a critically important step in the construction of this new curriculum; however, what is not clear is what theoretical or pedagogic bases are available to support teachers in actually teaching students to 'create' or author multimodal texts.