Your Multimodal/Cinematic Journal

In this article, we talk about how to use your Multimodal/Cinematic Journal.
Like any other components in R@W, your M/C Journal is a part of a ‘dialogue’ between challenging positions. Your M/C Journal helps you to move beyond passive absorption of information gained by generating your research data through interactions with your surroundings and your teammates.
In M/C Journal, you continuously compare your attitudes, understanding, perception with those of what you see in the world and how your teammates understand them.

While there are many platforms on the educational market to fit your technological and aesthetic preferences, the one R@W strongly recommends you to begin with is Canva.
It is a very simple process to set up your account on Canva for free. Just follow the prompts on:

https://www.canva.com/education/

In Ripples@Work, we employ cinematic writing, which is carried out using multimodal forms of expression—writing with text, images, sounds and animations. As you generate data on a topic and become more comfortable with the use of multimodal elements, your writing turns into a medium for analysing the processes of the mind.

‘The shower of words,’[i] flashes of memories, traces of shapes, and tingles of sensations that we’re continuously experiencing through our mind-cinema, become the material for making meaning of your inner virtual world. The R@W goal is to engage you in a metacognitive activity —thinking about your own thinking.

These self-reflective or metacognitive activities involve creative representation of your mind-cinema using multimodal components—text, images, sounds and animations.

Consider a page of a cinematic journal (CJ) as one frame within a sequence of page-frames that constitute the learning project.

‘The contents of the frame and the way that they are organized’[ii]  are termed in cinematography the mise-en-scène. The term refers to the elements of the scene, including the actors, as well as the style in which they combine to project a particular atmosphere in a cinematic story.

The idea of cinematic writing takes its roots from the origins of cinematic expression.

The word cinematography comes from two Greek roots: kinesis (the root of cinema), meaning movement, and grapho, which means to write or record. […] Writing with movement and light—it’s a great way to begin to think about the cinematographic content of motion pictures.[iii]

In this light, we see cinematic writing as writing with images, sounds and movement (animation or video). We adopt the concept of mise-en-scène to describe the way in which a learner consciously creates an atmosphere that is authentic to that individual.

German perceptual psychologist and film theorist Rudolf Arnheim once wrote: ‘The human mind is not easily accessible […] the person’s own mind, tends to shrink when it is watched.”[iv]

So, your task in producing a successful cinematic event—a story of your thinking about your thinking—is to create a sense of security and comfort for your own mind by using the components that you enjoy working with and that help you to establish a secure interplay between what is happening in your mind and what is projected through your cinematic writing.

Think about the screen of the digital device you’re working with as a portal that lets you move from the virtual world of your mind to the virtual digital world of the CJ.

That’s why we are talking about tinkering, something you do without much planning and evaluation before doing it. It is essential to trust yourself and be brave enough to respond to your impulses (if they are not hurting yourself or anyone else, of course ).

As the R@W metacognitive activity of cinematic writing is aimed at making sense of your inner mind-cinema, you should learn to ‘catch’ things from your mind and let them out—to be represented in your CJ.

Thoughts are triggered by our ‘desires and needs, our interests and emotions.’[v] In other words, our thoughts are the reflections of our unique experiences of being in the world. Through cinematic writing, we embody our thoughts and our feelings in visible or audible form.

For example, we can express feelings of anxiety by inserting the sound of the steps and ice cracking under the feet. Or by adding graphics of crows crying chaotically while flying across the page. In this way, we give an intangible feeling a ‘physical body’ by embodying it in a physical form, sound or movement.

The elements of cinematic writing—graphic design (GD) elements and generated multimodal assets—are discussed in the previous document.

They are the ‘what?’—GD elements, images, sounds, video and animation pieces, etc.

To use certain elements and tools cinematically, it’s important to know ‘why’—to comprehend the reason behind their use. It’s not about deciding whether or not to use them, but rather questioning why have you employed them.

And you have to experiment with ‘how?’—how to use the affordances of digital media to remix the elements, assets and existing knowledge into a meaningful interplay.

The term affordances[vi] was coined by American psychologist James J. Gibson. Gibson says that he made up the term to refer to what the environment offers to an individual organism.

When we talk about affordances in R@W, we refer to human—digital technology interactions. That is, what digital technology offers us and how you find your smart individual ways to take advantage of these affordances. Digital technology includes the World Wide Web, a virtual world of games and simulations, digital equipment, tools and software.

PowerPoint, despite being so widespread, has a range of affordances that are used rarely, poorly, or hardly at all. PowerPoint has become synonymous with boring slideshows that lack creativity, and as a result, for many people, the program has negative associations.

The learner may not know about the affordances of PowerPoint but discover them through the process of achieving their goals. And they may find ways to remix those affordances with the affordances of the internet and other digital tools to produce a meaningful outcome.