ICT role in 21st century education and its challenges
Introduction to Multimodal workshop
1. Developing Capacity in Multimodal Research,
Community Engagement and Energy Demand
Reduction, July 4-5th
2013, Cardiff City Hall
2. Welcome & Background to Workshop
• Energy & Communities (E&C) Joint
Venture (ESRC/EPSRC) (2010-2015)
• strategic objective: to make a significant
contribution to research on energy
demand reduction as part of Energy
Research Programme
• research to involve stakeholder
engagement to inform energy reduction at
community level
3. Why develop capacity in multimodal
research (MR)?
1. A field of innovative methodological development
in the social sciences: with potential to enhance
research-user engagement in the field of
sustainable energy & energy demand reduction
2. Continuation of key legacies; MR as developed by
QUALITI and Ethnography in the Digital Age
(Cardiff University) – by taking account of the
more complex multi-modality of meaning that is
afforded when working with assemblages of talk,
text, images (photographic and video) and sound
4. Why develop capacity in
multimodal research (MR)?
3. Two E&C teams with complementary multi-modal methodological
strengths:
Goldsmiths ‘sustainability innovation and community co-design’– engaging
participants through visual, aural, oneiric, emotional & physical affordances of
objects, artifacts and co-production events
Cardiff ‘Energy Biographies’ - innovative visual, temporal /qualitative longitudinal &
narrative methods for engaging people in their routine uses of energy
- Engaging creatively with multiple forms of qualitative data
- Enhancing principles and practices of qualitative data analysis
- Opening up spaces for reflection outside regulatory imperatives of demand
reduction
5. A creative alliance of social scientists
with the arts & humanities?
• Creative design, performance arts scholarship, social studies of science
& technology
• AHRC network (Henwood & Lavery, 2013-14) “making sense of
sustainability (including sustainable energy) through environmental
futures dialogue: An arts & social sciences collaboration”
www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/environmental-futures
• Compositional strategies, research as writing, narrative
practice/meaning-making, making sensorial-worldly connections
• Capacious research – accommodating imagination & the “as yet
undefined ontological object”
6. Aims of the 2-day workshop
1. Promote methodological development &
innovation in multimodal research
2. Use MR to consider ways to enhance research-user
engagement
3. Increase MR capability among researchers and
ongoing projects concerned with sustainable
communities, low carbon transitions and energy
demand reduction
7. Activities over the 2 days….
• Format involves invited talks, panel & plenary
discussions, & workshops in world café style
• Day one – working creatively and analytically with
multi-modal data (MMD)
• Day two – multimodality and public engagement
8. As a result of the workshop activities, we should
be in a better position to ….
• Significantly boost the creative capacity & insights of attendees & projects in
ways not initially accommodated within their original awards
• Transfer gains made to other researcher, policy & practitioner communities
– through demonstrating increased MR capacities within our respective
dissemination events & publications
• Key stimulus (at the workshop) - take forward plans for devising a mobile
exhibition of work conducted across E&C projects, to involve drawing
together a set of carefully designed, interactive and site based digital
resources & productions
• Some will be pre-existing while others may be developed as a result of the
collaborations started at the workshop