Blog 2 Revised

According to The New London Group, “available designs- the resources for Design-include the “grammers” of various semiotic systems: the grammers of languages, and the grammers of other semiotic systems such as film, photography, or gesture”. (194). There is also a order of discourse that is explored throughout the article, it explores some of the examples of schools and workplace environment that are considered to be more formal and social settings as less formal in terms of language and television. “ an order of discourse can be seen as a particular configuration of such elements. I may include a mixture of different semiotic systems-visual and aural semiotic systems in combination with language constitute the order if discourse of T.V, for insistence”. (194).

There is an interaction that is meant to happen from what I understand, take schools for example; many are culturally diverse and with that comes disciplining students as a teacher, but for the student it is much more in-depth. Different cultural backgrounds can often collide with one another setting of another discourse that connects people, places and time. Schools and the work place will naturally produce discourse because of its nature and the different people that do not realize are participating in it. This can be considered a form of design, this is a process of meaning and how is comes into shape. “Every moment of meaning involves the transformation of the available resources of meaning. Reading, seeing, and listening are all instances of Designing”. (195).

In some ways it is hard for me to understand that almost everything I do is a form of design but when it comes to school and the workplace I can see where the design factor comes in. I can that there is a n order to it, classrooms are designed for learning a particular subject and be graded on it by the teacher who is also design in their role of how to teach, interact, discipline and grade papers. Some may view this as being organized but knowing and understanding that it is a form of design makes it much more complex and takes the simplicity out of it. From what I can gather this article is a bit outdated, it seems as though email was somewhat new and the language, design and platform are major points of the article.

Pedagogy is the science and art of education, specifically instructional theory. An instructor develops conceptual knowledge and manages the content of learning activities in pedagogical settings. (Wikipedia). I had to post the definition of pedagogy because it is not a common term that you hear on a daily basis, but it is indeed a sophisticated term. I found it interesting that the New London Group points out the constant connection between the social and the human elements of how one learns. “ Any successful theory of pedagogy must be based on views about how the human mind works in society and classrooms as well as about the nature of teaching and learning”. (202).

Although I think that this article is a little outdated, I completely appreciate the focus of putting new media and multiliteraices into perspective in terms of language, society and the workplace. I thought that it was very interesting that they were concerned with the new language and how this can be taught and how the human mind connects to learning. For someone like myself who has difficulty learning the new forms of media, I can really appreciate the concern of effect this will potentially have on society. It was great to read that it was not just being pushed into society and that there was a concern for the reaction and discourse that we have, but I must admit that I liked the article. In almost everyway possible I have pushed back the idea of all of the new media forms, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace just to name a few on the social platform, only because I feel like it is a form of Big Brother watching. In terms of being a student and one day becoming a teacher, I can see how all these new multiliteracies will have a primary role in how we teach our children and how we as a society build toward our future and have the ability to create things that impact the world. So for those reasons I can admit and agree that learning and becoming multi-literate is probably a good thing.