Travis Dalsis—A Response to “The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts”

One of the main arguments stated is that just as there is a sophisticated cognitive interaction between print texts and an individual; likewise a similar sophisticated interface occurs when reading visual texts and hypertext.  Proficient readers of print text unconsciously utilize an array of cognitive functions to infer meaning and build understanding of a print text.  Walsh argues that reading involves “decoding, responding and comprehending at affective and cognitive levels, critiquing and analyzing” (25) that requires dynamic interaction (not static) with a text.  Additionally, Walsh emphasizes that we make similar transactions when reading visually or interactively on a website.  These new literacies require different strategies to decode the information.  As a reader enters an informational Internet site, he/she must understand the non-linear pathways that access information.  Reading is no longer left to right, up and down, but also contains multiple pathways through hyperlinks.  Students don’t chunk information sequentially as the writer intended.  One student may learn about a specific fact related to wolves using one hyperlink, while another will learn and experience a different fact from a different hyperlink simultaneously.  It’s interesting to posit the hypothesis that multimodal texts give more autonomy to the reader to control their own literary experience. 

Additionally, it’s interesting to notice that students who are asked to create cross-text connections have different mechanisms (internal and external) to do so.  Students who are using print texts are confined to their own cognitive schema and that of their peers (i.e. in literature groups).  However, if a student has access to the Internet to make cross-text connections, the community of available resources broadens astronomically!  Collaboration becomes instantaneous—the reader collaborates with technology the same way a print text reader may collaborate solely with a peer or their own previous experiences in reading print texts.

Overall, this article provided interesting insight and made visible some of the invisible processes that take place when reading multi-modal texts.  New literacies are shaping the educational landscape and to understand how we process information on different platforms positions educators to possess more agency.  The use of technology: projectors, Smart boards, laptops, digital e-book readers, and mp3 players has done something to education.  Educators have seen the cultural landscape and reacted to the ubiquitous forms of technological interactions that take place regularly.  Instead of calling them irrelevant to the learning process, we, as Walsh concludes, need to take our knee-jerk reactions as symptoms of our lack of understanding and add to our knowledge base analysis of multi-modal texts.