The Multimodal Blog: Co-Authored Texts in the Primary and Middle Years Classroom

Web 2.0 texts and spaces, such as blogs, have a great capacity to provide wide-ranging educational experiences through connecting geographically and culturally diverse students and classrooms. At the same time, blogs and other social spaces are uniquely multimodal in nature. Blog authors may draw upon a wide range of resources including image, sound, video and text to make meaning. Unique technological affordances, such as tagging and commenting, increase the mix of resources at the disposal of blog authors and their readers. Importantly, this distinctive multimodal environment, and its connective capacity, cultivates new techno-social communicative practices amongst its inhabitants. This chapter discusses the multimodal nature of blogs and the impact of techno-semiotic affordances on the construction of blogs as texts. In particular, it explores tagging and commenting as emerging modes of meaning that engage blog readers in novel text-constructive practices as collaborators with blog authors. The chapter highlights the ways in which blogs differ from other texts, and how opportunities for blog co-authorship by students may be exploited in primary and middle years classrooms.