The Imponderable Bloom: A Multimodal Social Semiotic Analysis of an Online Secondary English Course

The use of online learning and other software-powered technologies is on the rise in the United States, encouraged financially and politically by governmental and commercial entities. Specifically, online courses are gaining ground in K–12 public schools, schools which often purchase from third-party providers. After a decade in the New York City Department of Education as an English teacher and schools official responsible for a large-scale online learning programme, the author asks the question: How does the use of software-powered technologies like online learning affect the teaching of literature? In pursuit of this question, the author draws on concept from the field of software studies while adapting qualitative methods from multimodal studies to examine precisely how the nature of software (and the ideologies of those who create and sell it) are subtly influencing the teaching of literature.     

Developing an audiovisual notebook as a self‐learning tool in histology: Perceptions of teachers and students

Videos can be used as didactic tools for self‐learning under several circumstances, including those cases in which students are responsible for the development of this resource as an audiovisual notebook. We compared students' and teachers' perceptions regarding the main features that an audiovisual notebook should include. Four questionnaires with items about information, images, text and music, and filmmaking were used to investigate students' (n = 115) and teachers' perceptions (n = 28) regarding the development of a video focused on a histological technique. The results show that both students and teachers significantly prioritize informative components, images and filmmaking more than text and music. The scores were significantly higher for teachers than for students for all four components analyzed. The highest scores were given to items related to practical and medically oriented elements, and the lowest values were given to theoretical and complementary elements. For most items, there were no differences between genders. A strong positive correlation was found between the scores given to each item by teachers and students. These results show that both students' and teachers' perceptions tend to coincide for most items, and suggest that audiovisual notebooks developed by students would emphasize the same items as those perceived by teachers to be the most relevant. Further, these findings suggest that the use of video as an audiovisual learning notebook would not only preserve the curricular objectives but would also offer the advantages of self‐learning processes. Anat Sci Educ 7: 209–218. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.