Multimodal Communication through Books

I get exited when I find an interesting book, which also is important for my study! (Or is it interesting because it seems important?) Usually the book is from a library. I make notes in it with a pencil, make copies of the most important pages and erase the notes before returning to the library. But reading the copies is never the same!

During the copying the difference between left and right pages gets also erased, the numbers of pages have changed drastically, as well as the thickness and size of the book. My intuition doesn’t work any more in finding the most important quotations: I feel lost! Often I also lose my interest and excitement when all pages are the same A4-size, the paper sheets have the same white nuance and the same quality, and the colours form the front pages are gone…

One might think that communication through written texts doesn’t have much to offer – that it is objective and static – the letters and words are printed, and pages don’t really change much (when compared to digital pages). But, again if compared to a screen, books have their smell, thickness and weight, smoothness and consistency of covers, texture of quality of paper that influence the sounds the book makes when changing the pages. They are, after all, physical three dimensional objects that influence my senses and communicate in multimodal ways. This communication somehow gets personal - even before considering the contents of the book!

May be I should consider taking photographs rather than taking copies? A photo could at least preserve the illusion of three dimensionality…

Sharing a Nacho

One evening when friends were gathered around a table, I observed a 14 months old boy experimenting with corn nachos. He was sitting on his mother’s lap. A bowl with nachos and glasses filled with water were on the table (besides other things that are not important for what was going to happen).

The boy took a nacho and dipped it in his mother’s water glass, then he put it in his mouth and sucked. When he took another piece from the bowl, a woman that sat beside him caught his eye, and bended towards his hand asking him if she could get some. The boy first stretched his arm towards the woman’s mouth, but suddenly changed his mind and started to dip the nacho in the water. Now he held the nacho with both hands, each forefinger pressing against the thumb, pulling the nacho in opposite directions. His fingers slid along the moist surface. He repeated the dipping and pulling, again and again. The more he dipped, more slippery the nacho became. After a while he seemed to get annoyed, his fingers “got angry” and, to the boy’s big surprise, the nacho ended in small pieces on the table. There was a moment of silence – as he was just waken and needed a few seconds to “absorb” what had happened. Then he slowly and with confidence took one of the pieces, again stretched his arm towards the woman, and put the nacho piece in her mouth.

Observing the scene I wondered if he was used to tearing bread and had experience with dipping it in water. His mother approved that he did, but this was the first time he had tried with something else than bread. The nacho had un unfamiliar consistency – it was not possible to tear like a piece of bread! This surprised the boy – he didn’t know much about breaking by bending. The unexpected event of crushing the nacho gave him a new experience – and possibility to fulfil his intension to share!

What can I learn from this event? I believe that the child’s experience, gained through the experiment, wouldn’t be possible if the “materials” (nachos and water) were not on the table, or in a reachable distance. I also believe that the communication context was of a decisive important for motivating the boy’s actions (and learning?): an adult addressed him with a question and an inquiry.

It is also interesting to reflect about if the boy understood the words in the question, or he rather understood the woman’s body language (bending towards his hand with her mouth opened). I believe it was the combination of body language, setting around the table (for purpose of eating), and all the other dimensions in this multimodal communication context. Different “languages” support each other!

(The shown images are from an attempt to reconstruct the actual event - which was not possible to recunstruct entirely because the boy now (two months later) knew how to break a nacho easily.)

Am I Wasting My Time?

After an intensive lecture program last fall, this spring I have many days (white and new, like an unopened notebook) to fill up with whatever I want. Fantastic! This was something I really was looking for!

I start reading a book for the course on Qualitative research, and I enjoy it! But after an hour or something I think: Shouldn’t I be reading something else first? Then I read something else, but I still have a guilty conscience. Does the reading feel wrong because I enjoy it?! I’ll certainly have to do something with my conscience…

I am not sure if this is the way my students (on the teacher training program) feel when they are supposed to organize a few weeks of project work. I use to tell them: “If you feel like everything goes as it should, that you have enough time, are not stressed… - then something is definitively wrong!” Shouldn’t I also be more stressed? May be this is why I am a bit uneasy about my own use of time…?

And then, there is this blog writing… Is it of any benefit to my project, or is it just wasting of time? At least, I practice writing… But it will have to be more than that if anyone out there would be interested in reading my blogs! “In your writing, you must do some thing – try to gauge and reach and hold the attention of an audience you will never see”, says Harry F. Wolcott in his fantastic book Writing Up Qualitative Research.
“OK – I’ll try! But sorry, not today! Today I should probably be doing something else…