Øystein Gilje

Re‐mixing multimodal resources: multiliteracies and digital production in Norwegian media education

Youngsters are increasingly using digital technologies through participation in informal settings. Schools, however, seem to be struggling with implementing digital technologies into formal school activities. With the impact of digital technologies, media education can be seen as an increasingly important ‘transactional learning space’ between school‐based education and leisure activities among youth. Our analysis in this article is grounded in the framework of media learning and multiliteracies, focusing particularly on the re‐mixing of available semiotic resources downloaded from the Internet. We are interested in media production as a key defining component of the Norwegian media curriculum, especially how digital media and the Internet create new affordances that affect how students work on creative media production. We analyse interactional data from two school settings and discuss some of the implications of the main findings for broader current issues in Norwegian education, with an emphasis on digital literacy.

Multimodal Redesign in Filmmaking Practices: An Inquiry of Young Filmmakers' Deployment of Semiotic Tools in Their Filmmaking Practice.

This article traces the trajectory of one particular scene in the work of three media students writing and filmmaking. The analysis scrutinizes the role of semiotic tools, such as synopsis and storyboard, in students’ filmmaking practice. Moreover, the use of interactional data combined with textual data allows for a rich recording of the activity, aiming to integrate a multimodal analysis into a sociocultural perspective on learners’ composing practices. The findings indicate that the students are not able to transfer their particular meaning from the written mode into the language of moving images because they downplay the role of the semiotic tools available to them in the educational context.

Vidas de aprendizaje conectadas: Jóvenes digitales en espacios escolares y comunitarios

Aunque la mayoria de los estudios sobre el aprendizaje hablan de las experiencias intra-institucionales, nuestro interes se centra en el seguimiento de las trayectorias de aprendizaje individuales a traves de distintos dominios. Las investigaciones sobre el uso de los diferentes medios por los jovenes en el entorno extraescolar muestran como las practicas aplicadas en el uso de medios digitales difieren de las practicas en el entorno escolar, tanto en forma como en contenido. El reto principal actualmente consiste en encontrar formas de entender las interconexiones y la creacion de redes entre estos dos mundos de la vida, tal y como las experimentan los jovenes. Aqui los elementos importantes son los conceptos adaptados como contexto, trayectorias e identidad, relacionados con las redes de actividades. Presentamos datos del «proyecto sobre vidas de aprendizaje» actualmente en curso en una comunidad multicultural de Oslo. Nos centraremos especialmente en los alumnos de educacion secundaria post obligatoria que cursan estudios de Medios y Comunicacion. Con un enfoque etnografico, nos centraremos en la forma en que se construyen y se negocian las identidades del alumno en distintos tipos de relaciones de aprendizaje. Los datos incluyen datos generados por los investigadores (entrevistas, observaciones a traves de videos, anotaciones de campo) y datos generados por los participantes (fotografias, diarios, mapas).

Working in tandem with editing tools: iterative meaning-making in filmmaking practices

This article analyses how novice users explore the interface of sophisticated editing software ( Final Cut Express) when working with filters and special effects. Inspired by a multimodal and phenomenological perspective, the author seeks to elaborate a sociocultural approach in order to scrutinize these editing practices by using mediated action as a unit of analysis. The aim of the article is to understand how the editing software and its users work in tandem during the editing practice. The findings indicate that feedback from the software in the filmmaking process becomes a resource in the semiotic work of rethinking the visuals and soundtrack in the editing practices. As a result, the novice students could address more precisely how they wanted to communicate a specific scene visually and aurally.

Vidas de aprendizaje conectadas : Jóvenes digitales en espacios escolares y comunitarios = Learning Lives Connected : Digital Youth across School and Community Spaces.

Aunque la mayoria de los estudios sobre el aprendizaje hablan de las experiencias intra-institucionales, nuestro interes se centra en el seguimiento de las trayectorias de aprendizaje individuales a traves de distintos dominios. Las investigaciones sobre el uso de los diferentes medios por los jovenes en el entorno extraescolar muestran como las practicas aplicadas en el uso de medios digitales difieren de las practicas en el entorno escolar, tanto en forma como en contenido. El reto principal actualmente consiste en encontrar formas de entender las interconexiones y la creacion de redes entre estos dos mundos de la vida, tal y como las experimentan los jovenes. Aqui los elementos importantes son los conceptos adaptados como contexto, trayectorias e identidad, relacionados con las redes de actividades. Presentamos datos del «proyecto sobre vidas de aprendizaje» actualmente en curso en una comunidad multicultural de Oslo. Nos centraremos especialmente en los alumnos de educacion secundaria post obligatoria que cursan estudios de Medios y Comunicacion. Con un enfoque etnografico, nos centraremos en la forma en que se construyen y se negocian las identidades del alumno en distintos tipos de relaciones de aprendizaje. Los datos incluyen datos generados por los investigadores (entrevistas, observaciones a traves de videos, anotaciones de campo) y datos generados por los participantes (fotografias, diarios, mapas).

Curation as a new literacy practice

Curating, as a verb, incorporates many sub-components and actions; it suggests at least the following: collecting, cataloguing, arranging and assembling for exhibition, displaying. As well as the institutional and professional contexts for such work through the centuries and across cultures, many people have made personal collections of texts and artefacts that have stood for them in the world, in some ways, as representing a nexus of relationships, affiliations and markers of identity (Miller, 2008). As with so many aspects of life and cultural practices we should not expect people’s use of digital media to do anything other than change significantly the ways in which curation operates. Indeed it has been suggested that curation itself is now a metaphorical new literacy practice which incorporates the collection, production and exhibition of markers of identity through time in both digital production and social media (Potter, 2012). Such curated media collections and performances are provisional and contingent, permanent or transient and involve varying degrees of agency on the part of the end user, along with risk, opportunity and personal efficacy. For all ages this involves engaging and developing skills and dispositions which enable agency in some way; curatorship is to curation as authorship is to writing. New or adapted skill sets in new media are nascent in people of all ages but suggest certain ways of being and learning for younger people in formal or informal settings of learning. For the purposes of this special issue in E-learning and Digital Media we are defining curation/curatorship in new media as a distinctive new literacy practice and we are exploring through the articles the ways in which this impacts on, or is evidenced in, activity in a variety of spaces.

Tracing Learning Across Contexts

When studying young people’s learning activities across contexts in contemporary societies, it is almost impossible to ignore the role and impact of digital media, implying new methodological challenges for researchers. As this volume points out, it is hard to imagine how future fieldwork in educational studies can be “unplugged” from the digital realm.

Multimodal composition and assessment: a sociocultural perspective

Abstract In this article, we examine how assessment is enacted and negotiated in a school project that involves multimodal composition. The case is a project on advertisement in which lower secondary students collaboratively composed multimodal commercials about various products and topics. The theoretical framework is based on sociocultural perspectives on learning and assessment, and video data of classroom interaction are subjected to detailed analysis. The findings document the consequences of decoupling production and assessment practices. The analysis show that written texts and multimodal texts have different statuses in the project because of how they are assessed and that this has consequences for students’ participation as learners. In addition, the analysis shows how students position themselves differently towards resources that are intended to help them in summative assessment situations. We discuss issues that teachers may reflect upon when planning and executing multimodal composition in schools.

The Making of a Filmmaker: Curating Learning Identities in Early Careers.

As the work with moving images has become digitized, the availability and affordability of filmmaking has facilitated new forms of creative content production in various genres and contexts. On an institutional level, the creative and cultural sector of work is increasingly characterized by more fluid organizational structures, which include competitive work arrangements, blurring boundaries between formal and informal education and flexible employment patterns. On an individual level, a growing number of young adults are aspiring to be professionals, perhaps famous, following new paths and learning trajectories as they work their way into the film and TV sector. This paper explores how five young aspiring filmmakers (two girls and three boys) are creating their individual learning trajectories in the pre-peripheral and peripheral stages in their career. By drawing on a sociocultural perspective and the notion of ‘figured worlds’, we aim to illustrate how the young filmmakers perform a learning identity in the research project Making a Filmmaker. In our discussion of using interviews as a research method, we explore the metaphor of curatorship to understand how the filmmakers are positioning themselves in the contexts researched here. The findings indicate that the filmmakers perform their identity as creators by positioning themselves in relation to others in collaborative work and by the ways in which they imagine themselves as future filmmakers working with specific styles and genres.

Approaching Filmmaking as Digital Composing

An open-ended mix of text, pictures and moving images in new genres characterises many emerging literacy practices and affinity-based online cultures in the 21st-Century. In contrast to analogue technologies, digital technology makes it possible to combine different modes of communication in seamless ways. For instance, digital editing technology has made it possible to work within the fields of photography, animation and moving images with editing software, and more recently with apps on a wide range of tablets.