Abstract
In this paper-as-performance we will undertake an unrehearsed group walk – a ‘multimodal dérive’ – during the Third Bremen Conference on Multimodality. Through this exercise we intend to demonstrate that bringing together multimodality and mobile learning provides valuable opportunities for investigating our relationship with the urban, which in turn provokes questions about the social, cultural and political issues of our time. Instead of a conventional paper, our contribution will take place in the street and with an attention to the full of range of meaning-carrying material from which emerge impromptu sites for learning (Sharples et al., 2009).
Our excursion will also make the case for a nuanced understanding of ‘the digital’ within multimodal research. As we use our mobile devices to help navigate and record a path through the city we challenge the dualistic binary that conceptualises technology either as driver of change or tool for conveying meaning. Instead, we will examine the co-constituting nature of human and technology, which in turn asks questions about how we gather and understand multimodal data in an increasingly digital world.
While Kress and Pachler (2007) have recognised the compatibility of multimodality and mobile learning, little work has sought to exploit any conceptual and methodological common ground. By bringing multimodality in-step with mobile learning we will draw attention to the way that our understanding of the city exists at the intersection of an assemblage of human and non-human actors. This includes our personal interests and histories, the opportunities and limitations presented via code and algorithm within our technological devices, and a wider sphere of resources that shape our experiences in the moment: weather, hunger, traffic, time. Using conceptual work by De Souza e Silva & Frith (2013), we see urban space not as static containers of meaning waiting to be analysed, but rather as relational to an assemblage of agencies that go beyond what can be seen, heard and touched.
The excursion we undertake through Bremen should also be seen in the context of the growing interest in walking as a research practice. Thinking in particular about work around multimodality, we might look to the way that Ingold (2004) invites us to consider how we construct meaning through the repeated placing of feet-on-floor, as well as through what is seen and heard as we cut a path through the city. Walking-as-method has applications across the disciplines and falls-in-step with a range of research methods that seek to investigate our surroundings, including Scollon & Scollon’s geosemiotics (2002) and Pink’s work around sensory ethnography (2009).
References
De Souza e Silva, A., & Frith, J. (2013). Re-narrating the city through the presentation of location. The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, London, NY: Routledge.
Ingold T (2004). Culture on the ground the world perceived through the feet. Journal of Material Culture 9(3): 315-340.
Kress, G. & Pachler, N, (Eds.) (2007). ‘Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda’. WLE Centre, Occasional Papers in Work-based Learning 1. Available at: http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/5402/1/ mobilelearning_pachler_2007.pdf
Pink S (2009) Doing sensory ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Scollon R and Scollon SW (2003). Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. Abingdon. Routledge.
Sharples, M., Arnedillo-Sánchez, I., Milrad, M., & Vavoila, G. (2009). Mobile learning: Small devices, big issues. In N. Balacheff,, S. Ludvigsen, T. De Jong, A. Lazonder, S. Barnes, & L. Montandon (Eds.), Technology-Enhanced Learning (pp. 233-249). Berlin, Germany:Springer.
Our excursion will also make the case for a nuanced understanding of ‘the digital’ within multimodal research. As we use our mobile devices to help navigate and record a path through the city we challenge the dualistic binary that conceptualises technology either as driver of change or tool for conveying meaning. Instead, we will examine the co-constituting nature of human and technology, which in turn asks questions about how we gather and understand multimodal data in an increasingly digital world.
While Kress and Pachler (2007) have recognised the compatibility of multimodality and mobile learning, little work has sought to exploit any conceptual and methodological common ground. By bringing multimodality in-step with mobile learning we will draw attention to the way that our understanding of the city exists at the intersection of an assemblage of human and non-human actors. This includes our personal interests and histories, the opportunities and limitations presented via code and algorithm within our technological devices, and a wider sphere of resources that shape our experiences in the moment: weather, hunger, traffic, time. Using conceptual work by De Souza e Silva & Frith (2013), we see urban space not as static containers of meaning waiting to be analysed, but rather as relational to an assemblage of agencies that go beyond what can be seen, heard and touched.
The excursion we undertake through Bremen should also be seen in the context of the growing interest in walking as a research practice. Thinking in particular about work around multimodality, we might look to the way that Ingold (2004) invites us to consider how we construct meaning through the repeated placing of feet-on-floor, as well as through what is seen and heard as we cut a path through the city. Walking-as-method has applications across the disciplines and falls-in-step with a range of research methods that seek to investigate our surroundings, including Scollon & Scollon’s geosemiotics (2002) and Pink’s work around sensory ethnography (2009).
References
De Souza e Silva, A., & Frith, J. (2013). Re-narrating the city through the presentation of location. The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, London, NY: Routledge.
Ingold T (2004). Culture on the ground the world perceived through the feet. Journal of Material Culture 9(3): 315-340.
Kress, G. & Pachler, N, (Eds.) (2007). ‘Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda’. WLE Centre, Occasional Papers in Work-based Learning 1. Available at: http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/5402/1/ mobilelearning_pachler_2007.pdf
Pink S (2009) Doing sensory ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Scollon R and Scollon SW (2003). Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. Abingdon. Routledge.
Sharples, M., Arnedillo-Sánchez, I., Milrad, M., & Vavoila, G. (2009). Mobile learning: Small devices, big issues. In N. Balacheff,, S. Ludvigsen, T. De Jong, A. Lazonder, S. Barnes, & L. Montandon (Eds.), Technology-Enhanced Learning (pp. 233-249). Berlin, Germany:Springer.