The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning

摘要

I was recently informed, by an academic based in a psychology department, that most people at my institution (the Institute of Education in London) do not really study learning. They do sociology. The real stuff of learning is what goes on in people's heads. This came as something of a surprise, not least because relatively few colleagues refer to themselves as sociologists. Most of the people I work with research literacy and semiotics. In recent years, the study of how people make sense of texts has increasingly focused on new media, and the significance of globalisation and new technologies for communication. A group of researchers have been working on the concept of multimodality, to describe the way in which semiotic principles function across different modes of representation, including image, sound, and physical action (Jewitt, 2006; Kress and Jewitt, 2003; Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). This work is based in social semiotics, a theory of language and learning which emphasises that communicating and understanding are social processes. Learning is about understanding how to act as members of social groups (linguistic, cultural, professional and so on) and adopting the groups' culture, modes of thought and action, beliefs and values.