Multimodality, Multiliteracies, Multisemiotics

What in the world do these terms really mean? I decided I could no longer move forward without gaining a better understanding of what multimodal education is. Here are my best guesses, based upon the research I could find:

Williamson, Ben. "What are Multimodality, Multisemiotics, and Multiliteracies?" Futurelab.
May 2005.

Hmm. Sounds like a good place to start.

In order to move beyond what author Ben Williamson refers to as the "linguistic camouflage," some practical definitions of these terms are provided in the article. First, Williamson points out that while these newly coined terms have recently become popular within the language of teaching, the "phenomena" that the terms describe is hardly new:

Everyday experiences of every individual are multimodal: we see, we hear, we touch, we smell, and we taste. Our experience of the world comes to us through the multiple modes of communication to which each of our senses is attuned.

• Multimodal, then, refers to a multiple access to data, originally referring to the ways we learn to interact with the computer.

• The multiple meanings we are able to derive from these modes of communication, ie: the five senses, are what we call multisemiotics.

• Our ability to read these multiple modes of communication is what we refer to as multiliteracy. Eventually we not only become adept readers of multiple modes of communication, but we become creators of it as well.

These terms were created in order to be able to discuss the "altered landscape" that our children are growing up in today. Not only do they interact with and recreate print texts alone, but they engage in music, motion, pictures, hyperlinks, video games, etc. Generally, this interaction happens with more than one "mode" at once. For example, when reading a webpage, students visually read text, they encounter pictures, they manipulate the text by clicking on hyperlinks, they interact with the text through games. This is much more than reading words from a page.

How students create "whole" meaning from these multiple modes is how we describe multiple literacies. We might say a students who can decipher the whole meaning of an interactive website is multi-literate. Williamson describes it this way:

While multimodality is not exclusively new, then, it is clearly important for us to be able to accurately describe the altered landscape of communication that young people are growing up in. Likewise, their experiences of learning will be increasingly visual, aural and interactive, not simply because they will have better access to computers, but because teachers no longer simply speak at children, and children no longer simply read texts and write down responses.

Multimodality and multisemiotics are attempts to theorise these multiple forms of communication, identifying how multiple modes such as images, words, and actions all depend on each other to create whole meanings.