Metamodal mastery “acknowledge the ability to work strategically and with a degree of personal agency across different media and disciplines” (227). Put another way, it “is the ability to discover, create, produce, analyze, synthesize, integrate, and share data, content, artifacts, vocabularies, and epistemologies from a variety of fields in many collaborative modes and media, within and across metadmodal platforms to enhance student learning” (231). It “is a level of expertise that is only fully realized when students and researchers with such expertise in multiple fields come together to create a multimodal argument synthesizing their diverse perspectives in a way that crosses their disciplinary boundaries and emerges in a subsequent hybridity” (228).
The authors contrast mastery with literacy. “Literacy ‘is about ideas that have their best expression in words’…Mastery…effectively defers the question of the representational mode in favor of level of competency, generating new ideas, products, or perspectives, but is more appropriate to metamedia, which privileges the semiotic potential of visual over the linguistic” (231).
The authors use Second Life and Croquet-Open Cobalt as potential instances and pedagogical uses of metamodality.
Other Key Term
- Metamedia: “not just another media type: they are virtual portals for delivering a range of media and media applications to both producers and consumers of media. They are distinct from ‘multimedia’; the emphasis in metamedia is not merely on the existence of more than one media type )as it is with multimedia) but on the creative environment in which multiple-types composition becomes a complex and diverse activity across media and can be manipulated for various semiotic and aesthetic purposes” (227).