Digital multimodal texts and their role in project work: opportunities and dilemmas

This paper explores how and to what extent digital multimodal text production can play a role in project work. The focus is upon describing and understanding how teachers and learners view multimodal text production as part of a learning process. Group-based project work has been used extensively in Norwegian schools since the 1970s. One criticism of this learning approach has been that peers are too passive and show a lack of enthusiasm during presentations; another is that group work is not a real form of collaboration, but only cooperation in order to divide the workload. The authors argue that when learners are offered the opportunity to create their presentations as multimodal digital texts it leads to an improvement of both group work processes and the level of engagement in the presentation of the final product.