Abstract This paper considers new ways of thinking about and planning learning experiences in the... more Abstract This paper considers new ways of thinking about and planning learning experiences in the middle years of schooling. It foregrounds the notion that educational experiences can be viewed as Learning by Design and explores the ways in which teachers can construct effective learning for all students within this framework.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ba... more Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in all its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. Because… technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it. (Benjamin, 1936/2008, p. 242)
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'18), 2018
Online education has been going through numerous transformations as new and innovative technologi... more Online education has been going through numerous transformations as new and innovative technologies influence and shape new e-learning portals. Differentiated e-learning promises to add value and enhance the educational services provided by an academic institution. In this paper we present our online learning model that advocates and endorses differentiated learning as an e-learning affordance that has been facilitated through the development of new learning technologies. We demonstrate how the online portal enables and supports multiple instances whereby differentiated learning is applied and practiced, including through the use of a novel analytics tool that sums up the overall learner effort in one visual. The paper advances the notion of “productive diversity” in learning, replacing the templated sameness characterizing the communicative practices of “didactic pedagogy,” including textbooks, lectures, tests. Today’s computer-mediated, networked learning environments can support ...
2018 17th International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET), 2018
Massive numbers of online learners have opted to enrol in MOOC platforms such as Coursera, EdX an... more Massive numbers of online learners have opted to enrol in MOOC platforms such as Coursera, EdX and Udacity, where a plethora of topical courses are offered. However, a limitation of all those platforms is that they cannot effectively support teaching higher order thinking, such as critical thinking, due to logistical issues in assessing such skills. This paper discusses a pedagogically designed online system that employs a set of purposely devised techniques based on a reflexive ideology, whereby complex reasoning skills such as critical and creative thinking form part of the process. Additionally, peer- and self- reviewing together with feedback upon feedback enables scalable assessment of complex critical thinking assignments. We investigate the effect of such processes as we analyse assessment data collected from a pilot project in a single online course with just 150 students that made full use of our system, providing over 3.5 million essential data points. A pre- and post- survey also provided additional quantitative and qualitative data as we close the paper with a series of conclusions and recommendations.
2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2018
Traditional education promotes the self as it seeks to encourage learners to acquire knowledge an... more Traditional education promotes the self as it seeks to encourage learners to acquire knowledge and cultivate individual cognition through memorization and the application of procedures to achieve expected answers. Collaboration in class has been sporadically practiced when major tasks require necessary group-work and coordinated team efforts with clear objectives to instill a sense of collaboration within learners in preparation for demands of the workplace. In this paper we present a case study of how we engage graduate students through new media within our online environment, whereby, instead of memory work they focus their evidentiary work as knowledge artefacts created through digital media. We encourage and value the learners’ knowledge representations assembled in the form of rich, multimodal sources employing any of the available media.
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, 2018
Student performance over a course of an academic program can be significantly affected and positi... more Student performance over a course of an academic program can be significantly affected and positively influenced through a series of feedback processes by peers and tutors. Ideally, this feedback is structured and incremental, and as a consequence, data presents at large scale even in relatively small classes. In this paper, we investigate the effect of such processes as we analyze assessment data collected from online courses. We plan to fully analyze the massive dataset of over three and a half million granular data points generated to make the case for the scalability of these kinds of learning analytics. This could shed crucial light on assessment mechanism in MOOCs, as we continue to refine our processes in an effort to strike a balance of emphasis on formative in addition to summative assessment.
International Journal of Learning and Teaching, 2020
With the rise of social networking sites and the arrival of an open education era characterized b... more With the rise of social networking sites and the arrival of an open education era characterized by Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs, learning is undergoing a paradigm shift which requires new assessment strategies. The boundaries between what we know, how we know it and the ways we assess and evaluate knowledge in formal and informal settings are now blurred [1], [2]. In these environments, students often interact with one another to produce and reproduce knowledge and transfer it into a new context to reach a mastery level of learning [3]. The massive amount of data being generated by learners makes it easier to assess performance than ever before [4], [5]. Every learner action is logged and factored in as a source of evidence to contribute to the overall learner assessment both from a summative perspective, and also in a formative way where immediate feedback is actionable. The integration of learning analytics tools and machine learning techniques can facilitate the process of assessment. In this paper we present a case study to show how the integration of learning analytics benefited learners and improved their performance in an online educational course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, while also holding them accountable for their own learning. The study utilized a survey method for data collection and quantitative and qualitative data analysis to interpret learners' experiences after taking the course.
International Journal of Learning and Teaching, 2019
Educators frequently encourage and value the use of a variety of media in student work, as learne... more Educators frequently encourage and value the use of a variety of media in student work, as learners design their knowledge representations using rich, multimodal sources and embedding multiple types of complementary media-photographs, diagrams, tables, data visualizations, videos, and raw datasets. The pedagogical and cognitive benefits of shifting meaning representation across a range of integrated modalities enriches their understanding. In this paper we present our experiences and findings from a casestudy in which graduate learners are engaged in the creation of knowledge artefacts as part of their evidentiary work in an online environment. The e-learning portal we created supports and enables the incorporation of all types of new media through its "Creator" interface as they move incrementally towards subject-matter mastery. We present the rationale behind our design, together with methodologies employed to encourage the creative use of diverse yet complementary media. Finally, we present results from qualitative data collected and analysed regarding the use of rich, multimodal sources, as we come to a close with a number of conclusions and recommendations.
In today’s increasingly fast-moving digital world, learners are immersed in multimodal online com... more In today’s increasingly fast-moving digital world, learners are immersed in multimodal online communication environments in their daily life, through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others. This requires educators to reflect the environment in which these learners live, and thus design instructional practices from a multimodal perspective. Multimodality offers new opportunities for digital learners to express themselves, analyze problems and make meaning in multimodal ways as they interpret knowledge differently according to their various educational needs (Kalantzis & Cope, 2015). In this paper we will discuss the significance of integrating multimodality in e-Learning contexts to make meaning and improve learning. The paper will also present a case study of an online course from the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign to show how multimodality works in practice to cater to learner differences by offering a range of activity options and mo...
The prospect of “big data” at once evokes optimistic views of an information-rich future and conc... more The prospect of “big data” at once evokes optimistic views of an information-rich future and concerns about surveillance that adversely impacts our personal and private lives. This overview article explores the implications of big data in education, focusing by way of example on data generated by student writing. We have chosen writing because it presents particular complexities, highlighting the range of processes for collecting and interpreting evidence of learning in the era of computer-mediated instruction and assessment as well as the challenges. Writing is significant not only because it is central to the core subject area of literacy; it is also an ideal medium for the representation of deep disciplinary knowledge across a number of subject areas. After defining what big data entails in education, we map emerging sources of evidence of learning that separately and together have the potential to generate unprecedented amounts of data: machine assessments, structured data embed...
Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prio... more Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prioritize what to revise. Yet, this process can be both daunting and difficult. This study looks at how students used a semantic concept mapping tool to represent the content and organization of their initial draft of an informational text. We examine the processes of students at two different schools as they remediated their own texts and how those processes impacted the development of their rhetorical, conceptual, and communicative capacities. Our analysis suggests that students creating visualizations of their completed first drafts scaffolded self-evaluation. The mapping tool aided visualization by converting compositions into discrete persistent visual data elements that represented concepts and connections. This often led to students' meta-awareness of what was missing
Cultures of Schooling (RLE Edu L Sociology of Education), 2012
This volume examines the ways schools respond to cultural and linguistic diversity. A richness of... more This volume examines the ways schools respond to cultural and linguistic diversity. A richness of accumulated experience is portrayed in this study of six Australian secondary schools; partial success, near success or instructive failure as the culture of the school itself was transformed in an attempt to meet the educational needs of its students. Set in the context of a general historical background to the development of multicultural education in Australia, a theoretical framework is developed with which to analyze the move from the ...
Abstract This paper considers new ways of thinking about and planning learning experiences in the... more Abstract This paper considers new ways of thinking about and planning learning experiences in the middle years of schooling. It foregrounds the notion that educational experiences can be viewed as Learning by Design and explores the ways in which teachers can construct effective learning for all students within this framework.
Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education
Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ba... more Just as a child who has learned to grasp stretches out its hand for the moon as it would for a ball, so humanity, in all its efforts at innervation, sets its sights as much on currently utopian goals as on goals within reach. Because… technology aims at liberating human beings from drudgery, the individual suddenly sees his scope for play, his field of action, immeasurably expanded. He does not yet know his way around this space. But already he registers his demands on it. (Benjamin, 1936/2008, p. 242)
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'18), 2018
Online education has been going through numerous transformations as new and innovative technologi... more Online education has been going through numerous transformations as new and innovative technologies influence and shape new e-learning portals. Differentiated e-learning promises to add value and enhance the educational services provided by an academic institution. In this paper we present our online learning model that advocates and endorses differentiated learning as an e-learning affordance that has been facilitated through the development of new learning technologies. We demonstrate how the online portal enables and supports multiple instances whereby differentiated learning is applied and practiced, including through the use of a novel analytics tool that sums up the overall learner effort in one visual. The paper advances the notion of “productive diversity” in learning, replacing the templated sameness characterizing the communicative practices of “didactic pedagogy,” including textbooks, lectures, tests. Today’s computer-mediated, networked learning environments can support ...
2018 17th International Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET), 2018
Massive numbers of online learners have opted to enrol in MOOC platforms such as Coursera, EdX an... more Massive numbers of online learners have opted to enrol in MOOC platforms such as Coursera, EdX and Udacity, where a plethora of topical courses are offered. However, a limitation of all those platforms is that they cannot effectively support teaching higher order thinking, such as critical thinking, due to logistical issues in assessing such skills. This paper discusses a pedagogically designed online system that employs a set of purposely devised techniques based on a reflexive ideology, whereby complex reasoning skills such as critical and creative thinking form part of the process. Additionally, peer- and self- reviewing together with feedback upon feedback enables scalable assessment of complex critical thinking assignments. We investigate the effect of such processes as we analyse assessment data collected from a pilot project in a single online course with just 150 students that made full use of our system, providing over 3.5 million essential data points. A pre- and post- survey also provided additional quantitative and qualitative data as we close the paper with a series of conclusions and recommendations.
2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2018
Traditional education promotes the self as it seeks to encourage learners to acquire knowledge an... more Traditional education promotes the self as it seeks to encourage learners to acquire knowledge and cultivate individual cognition through memorization and the application of procedures to achieve expected answers. Collaboration in class has been sporadically practiced when major tasks require necessary group-work and coordinated team efforts with clear objectives to instill a sense of collaboration within learners in preparation for demands of the workplace. In this paper we present a case study of how we engage graduate students through new media within our online environment, whereby, instead of memory work they focus their evidentiary work as knowledge artefacts created through digital media. We encourage and value the learners’ knowledge representations assembled in the form of rich, multimodal sources employing any of the available media.
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, 2018
Student performance over a course of an academic program can be significantly affected and positi... more Student performance over a course of an academic program can be significantly affected and positively influenced through a series of feedback processes by peers and tutors. Ideally, this feedback is structured and incremental, and as a consequence, data presents at large scale even in relatively small classes. In this paper, we investigate the effect of such processes as we analyze assessment data collected from online courses. We plan to fully analyze the massive dataset of over three and a half million granular data points generated to make the case for the scalability of these kinds of learning analytics. This could shed crucial light on assessment mechanism in MOOCs, as we continue to refine our processes in an effort to strike a balance of emphasis on formative in addition to summative assessment.
International Journal of Learning and Teaching, 2020
With the rise of social networking sites and the arrival of an open education era characterized b... more With the rise of social networking sites and the arrival of an open education era characterized by Massive Open Online Courses MOOCs, learning is undergoing a paradigm shift which requires new assessment strategies. The boundaries between what we know, how we know it and the ways we assess and evaluate knowledge in formal and informal settings are now blurred [1], [2]. In these environments, students often interact with one another to produce and reproduce knowledge and transfer it into a new context to reach a mastery level of learning [3]. The massive amount of data being generated by learners makes it easier to assess performance than ever before [4], [5]. Every learner action is logged and factored in as a source of evidence to contribute to the overall learner assessment both from a summative perspective, and also in a formative way where immediate feedback is actionable. The integration of learning analytics tools and machine learning techniques can facilitate the process of assessment. In this paper we present a case study to show how the integration of learning analytics benefited learners and improved their performance in an online educational course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, while also holding them accountable for their own learning. The study utilized a survey method for data collection and quantitative and qualitative data analysis to interpret learners' experiences after taking the course.
International Journal of Learning and Teaching, 2019
Educators frequently encourage and value the use of a variety of media in student work, as learne... more Educators frequently encourage and value the use of a variety of media in student work, as learners design their knowledge representations using rich, multimodal sources and embedding multiple types of complementary media-photographs, diagrams, tables, data visualizations, videos, and raw datasets. The pedagogical and cognitive benefits of shifting meaning representation across a range of integrated modalities enriches their understanding. In this paper we present our experiences and findings from a casestudy in which graduate learners are engaged in the creation of knowledge artefacts as part of their evidentiary work in an online environment. The e-learning portal we created supports and enables the incorporation of all types of new media through its "Creator" interface as they move incrementally towards subject-matter mastery. We present the rationale behind our design, together with methodologies employed to encourage the creative use of diverse yet complementary media. Finally, we present results from qualitative data collected and analysed regarding the use of rich, multimodal sources, as we come to a close with a number of conclusions and recommendations.
In today’s increasingly fast-moving digital world, learners are immersed in multimodal online com... more In today’s increasingly fast-moving digital world, learners are immersed in multimodal online communication environments in their daily life, through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and others. This requires educators to reflect the environment in which these learners live, and thus design instructional practices from a multimodal perspective. Multimodality offers new opportunities for digital learners to express themselves, analyze problems and make meaning in multimodal ways as they interpret knowledge differently according to their various educational needs (Kalantzis & Cope, 2015). In this paper we will discuss the significance of integrating multimodality in e-Learning contexts to make meaning and improve learning. The paper will also present a case study of an online course from the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign to show how multimodality works in practice to cater to learner differences by offering a range of activity options and mo...
The prospect of “big data” at once evokes optimistic views of an information-rich future and conc... more The prospect of “big data” at once evokes optimistic views of an information-rich future and concerns about surveillance that adversely impacts our personal and private lives. This overview article explores the implications of big data in education, focusing by way of example on data generated by student writing. We have chosen writing because it presents particular complexities, highlighting the range of processes for collecting and interpreting evidence of learning in the era of computer-mediated instruction and assessment as well as the challenges. Writing is significant not only because it is central to the core subject area of literacy; it is also an ideal medium for the representation of deep disciplinary knowledge across a number of subject areas. After defining what big data entails in education, we map emerging sources of evidence of learning that separately and together have the potential to generate unprecedented amounts of data: machine assessments, structured data embed...
Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prio... more Once writers complete a first draft, they are often encouraged to evaluate their writing and prioritize what to revise. Yet, this process can be both daunting and difficult. This study looks at how students used a semantic concept mapping tool to represent the content and organization of their initial draft of an informational text. We examine the processes of students at two different schools as they remediated their own texts and how those processes impacted the development of their rhetorical, conceptual, and communicative capacities. Our analysis suggests that students creating visualizations of their completed first drafts scaffolded self-evaluation. The mapping tool aided visualization by converting compositions into discrete persistent visual data elements that represented concepts and connections. This often led to students' meta-awareness of what was missing
Cultures of Schooling (RLE Edu L Sociology of Education), 2012
This volume examines the ways schools respond to cultural and linguistic diversity. A richness of... more This volume examines the ways schools respond to cultural and linguistic diversity. A richness of accumulated experience is portrayed in this study of six Australian secondary schools; partial success, near success or instructive failure as the culture of the school itself was transformed in an attempt to meet the educational needs of its students. Set in the context of a general historical background to the development of multicultural education in Australia, a theoretical framework is developed with which to analyze the move from the ...
Introdução do livro Letramentos, de Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope e Petrilson Pinheiro, publicado em ... more Introdução do livro Letramentos, de Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope e Petrilson Pinheiro, publicado em outubro de 2020 pela Editora Unicamp
Third of a series of four books that examines emerging markets for publishing services in general... more Third of a series of four books that examines emerging markets for publishing services in general and books in particular. This volume is focussed on export markets for books, providing a comprehensive look at services and strategies for working effectively in the global market for publishing services, particularly in the burgeoning publishing markets of Asia. It also examines practical lessons that can be learned about the future role of the book business in the international knowledge economy. Includes notes on contributors and references. Publication is a joint project of the publisher and RMIT University, based on research funded under the Infrastructure and Industry Competitiveness Scheme (EPICS) of the Commonwealth Department of Industry, Science and Resources. Published in both paperback and downloadable PDF format.
This book explores a phenomenon we call "e-learning ecologies". We use this metaphor because a le... more This book explores a phenomenon we call "e-learning ecologies". We use this metaphor because a learning environment is in some senses like an ecosystem, consisting of the complex interaction of human, textual, discursive and spatial dynamics. These take a coherent, systemic form. Traditional classrooms, with their linear arrangement of seating and desks, their lecturing teachers, their textbooks, their student workbooks, their classroom discussions are also learning systems. Moving from one of these classrooms to another, the modes of interaction are familiar and predictable because they are so systematically patterned. After a while, they seem "normal". However, these are strange human artifacts that were not put together into this configuration until the nineteenth century. They quickly became universal and compulsory sites of socialization of massinstitutionalized education. In terms of the long arc of human history, it was not until our the time of about our great, great grandparents that we first encountered these modern educational systems. But will these institutional forms survive long into the twenty-first century? Is it time for them to be reformed? And if change is to come, what will be the role of new technologies of knowledge representation and communication in bringing about change? This book explores transformations in the patterns of pedagogy that accompany elearning, or the use of computing devices to mediate or supplement the relationships between learners and teachers, to present and assess learnable content, to provide spaces where students do their work, and to mediate peer-to-peer interactions. Our thesis is this: e-learning ecologies may play a key part in the largest shift in the systems of modern education since their rise to dominance in the nineteenth century. Everything may change-configurations of space, learner-to-teacher and learner-tolearner relationships, the textual forms of knowledge to which learners are exposed, the kinds of knowledge artifacts that students create, and they way their outcomes of their learning are measured. Or, we may introduce a whole lot of technology into schools, and nothing changes in institutional or epistemic senses. Technology is pedagogically neutral. So our questions of e-learning ecologies becomes these: how can they be different? And, why should they be different? About this Book This book is a collaborative work, written by the members of the "new learning" research group coordinated by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, including colleagues, postdocs and graduate students at the University of Illinois, some of whom have authored the chapters in this book. The work of the group has been in part conceptual, to create an analytical
The Taos Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development of social constructio... more The Taos Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development of social constructionist theory and practice for purposes of world benefit. Constructionist theory and practice locate the source of meaning, value, and action in communicative relations among people. Our major investment is in fostering relational processes that can enhance the welfare of people and the world in which they live. Taos Institute Publications offers contributions to cutting-edge theory and practice in social construction. Our books are designed for scholars, practitioners, students, and the openly curious public. The Focus Book Series provides brief introductions and overviews that illuminate theories, concepts, and useful practices. The Tempo Book Series is especially dedicated to the general public and to practitioners. The Books for Professionals Series provides indepth works that focus on recent developments in theory and practice. WorldShare Books is an online offering of books in PDF format for free download from our website. Our books are particularly relevant to social scientists and to practitioners concerned with individual, family, organizational, community, and societal change.
"Translanguaging" is a concept that connects with older traditions of analysis in linguistics and... more "Translanguaging" is a concept that connects with older traditions of analysis in linguistics and practices in language pedagogy, while at the same time making some distinctions that justify the creation of a new word. In this chapter, we set out to extend the terms of this discussion by introducing another term, "transposition," a concept designed to cast the net wider than language. Transposition captures the restless fluidity of multimodal meaning making. In their constant movement, meanings are both translatable and to an extent untranslatable-across different forms and functions of meaning that must be conceived more broadly than distinct "languages" or even "language" itself. Digital media precipitate a renewed urgency to reconsider the terms of our theoretical discussions and pedagogical practices. They raise challenges, at once deeply concerning and potentially productive, for the job of language teaching and its professional practices. Our theme in this chapter is "meaning without borders," or the project of supplementing traditional analyses of meaning-through-language and developing a widened repertoire of pedagogical practice for language teachers.
Remixing Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice from New London to New Times, 2017
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis were the original organizers of the New London Group meetings and ha... more Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis were the original organizers of the New London Group meetings and have been the most actively involved in further developing the concept of Multiliteracies. In this chapter, they are joined by Sandra Schamroth Abrams to review two decades of work, to explore emerging directions in the era of the digital creation, and to address the seminal questions: What is the contemporary relevance of Multiliteracies, and what can we do to leverage the social affordances of new technologies in the service of improving learning opportunities for all students?
This chapter explores the connections between the bio and the digital in the construction of 'bio... more This chapter explores the connections between the bio and the digital in the construction of 'bioinformation' and 'biodigital convergence'. The site of examination of these connections is medical understandings of the body. Its focus is the notion of ontology in two, related senses, philosophical and technical. Philosophically, the chapter considers the connections between the immaterial understanding reflected in medical knowledge, in philosophical terms, 'the ideal' or ideational on the one hand, and on the other, the material, biological realities of bodies. In a technical sense, the chapter discusses medical ontologies in a computer science frame of reference, and the emergence in recent years of 'knowledge graphs' for their representation. On these philosophical and technical bases, the chapter goes on to discuss a research and development project in which the authors have been engaged, to develop a web-based knowledge graphing environment, with a wide range of potential sites of applications, one to support medical students in clinical case analysis, and the other to build medical logic visualizations to supplement electronic health records.
This is the story of a handful of researchers and thinkers at the University of Illinois who crea... more This is the story of a handful of researchers and thinkers at the University of Illinois who created the world’s first e-learning system, PLATO. It’s a little story, because it was just a few workers of the mind who came up with some ingenious ideas. Eventually these ideas could be named as networked computing, the visual user-interface, and instant messaging. Some of the foundational aspects of our twenty-first century world of digitally-mediated meaning were invented by the small group of researchers connected with the PLATO project. These ideas were not conjured up by engineers imagining life half a century ahead into the social and technological future. They were tackling something much more practical: to build a “teaching machine.” Over a thirty-year period, starting in 1959 they built PLATO I, then PLATO II, III and IV. Their portentous innovations were not in the first instance technical; they were educational. Educational requirements drove the project and the technology followed. Along the way, the relationships between the professional educators and the professional engineers became at times testy. But after a time the PLATO project did manage to draw in educators from the College of Education, who developed innovative approaches to the application of networked computing to education. These are the foundations of today’s notion of “e-learning.” The little story became a big story, both in education and our wider world of social meaning. This article is an attempt to recover this now largely forgotten little story of the origins of e-learning, and more.
These are times of unprecedented change in education. Digitally-mediated online education looms l... more These are times of unprecedented change in education. Digitally-mediated online education looms large as one of the most significant harbingers change. Potentially, for better or for worse, no classroom and no formal or informal learning process will be left unchanged. Immediately, this statement demands complication. On the one hand, online education is a classical technological disruption of traditional practices of teaching and learning. Yet on the other hand, some of the technological changes represent in pedagogical terms, little or no change at all. In fact, worse than that, we will argue some forms of online learning can serve to ossify anachronistic practices, to a point at times where they almost become back-to-the future parodies of their past selves. On the disruptive side of change, business theorists Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen speak to technology in general when they analyze "disruptive innovation" (Bower and Christensen 1995). This is a variation on an older theme of technological and social change where Joseph Schumpeter famously called capitalism a system of "creative destruction" (Schumpeter 1950 [1976]: 81). Applying their analysis to education, Christensen and colleagues predict enormous change in which some old education institutions and teaching practices die while others thrive (Christensen, Horn and Johnson 2008). In pedagogical terms, implementing technology need not produce reform. We can video our lectures, but the didactic form of the lecture does not change. We can move from print to e-textbooks, but the genre of the textbook as a medium of content transmission remains the same. We can deliver courses in learning management systems, but the lock-step logic of the traditional syllabus stays the same. We can deploy online tests, but the process of assessment to discriminating the few who succeed from the many who are destined to be mediocre or to fail, remains unchanged. The paradox here is that the transition to new technology-the technological infrastructures provided to teachers and learners by the decision makers in our schools and colleges-may at times force us to replicate didactic patterns of teaching and learning. In this case, technology stifles the possibility of pedagogical innovation, even when innovation is needed and perhaps within reach. Technology does not in itself determine the shape of change. We can put it to different kinds of use; it only has "affordances," or a range of possible applications. Psychologist James Gibson coined this word, capturing the idea that meaning is shaped by the materiality of the media we have at our disposal. His work is at an elemental, creaturely level: "The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill" (Gibson 1979 [2015]: 119).
Multifaceted Multilingualism, edited by K. K. Grohmann, 2020
"Translanguaging" is a concept that connects with older traditions of analysis in linguistics and... more "Translanguaging" is a concept that connects with older traditions of analysis in linguistics and practices in language pedagogy, while at the same time making some distinctions that justify the creation of a new word. In this chapter, we set out to extend the terms of this discussion by introducing another term, "transposition," a concept designed to cast the net wider than language. Transposition captures the restless fluidity of multimodal meaning making. In their constant movement, meanings are both translatable and to an extent untranslatable-across different forms and functions of meaning that must be conceived more broadly than distinct "languages" or even "language" itself. Digital media precipitate a renewed urgency to reconsider the terms of our theoretical discussions and pedagogical practices. They raise challenges, at once deeply concerning and potentially productive, for the job of language teaching and its professional practices. Our theme in this chapter is "meaning without borders," or the project of supplementing traditional analyses of meaning-through-language and developing a widened repertoire of pedagogical practice for language teachers.
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