This article reports research that attempts to characterize what is powerful about digital multimodal texts. Building from recent theoretical work on understanding the workings and implications of multimodal communication, the authors call for a continuing empirical investigation into the roles that digital multimodal texts play in real-world contexts, and they offer one example of how such investigations might be approached. Drawing on data from the practice of multimedia digital storytelling, specifically a piece titled “Lyfe-N-Rhyme,” created by Oakland, California, artist Randy Young (accessible at http://www.oaklanddusty.org/videos.php), the authors detail the method and results of a fine-grained multimodal analysis, revealing semiotic relationships between and among different, copresent modes. It is in these relationships, the authors argue, that the expressive power of multimodality resides.

In this article we review research on literacy in out-of-school settings. Our first purpose is to identify the conceptual advances in theories of literacy that have arisen from non-school-based research and to trace their evolution. We are especially interested in clarifying the historical roots of current theories. A second purpose is to highlight recent research on literacy in out-of-school settings that exemplifies the range and dimensions of current work. Finally, we call for an examination of the relationships between school and nonschool contexts as a new direction for theory and research. We ask, How can research on literacy and out-of-school learning help us to think anew about literacy teaching and learning across a range of contexts, including school?

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How are identities as cosmopolitan citizens realized in practice, and how can dialogue be fostered across differences in culture, language, ideology, and geography? More particularly, how might young people be positioned to develop effective and ethical responses, in our digital age, to local and global concerns? Such are the questions we addressed in a design-based research project that linked young people around the world via a private social network. In effect, we studied cosmopolitanism "on the ground," as youth on the cusp of adulthood came to think and act reflexively about the opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges of intercultural, crossgeographic communication in a global, digital world. To analyze the conversations and creative artifacts exchanged by groups of youth in New York City and in India, we invoked the cosmopolitan construct of "proper distance," asking how participants gauged their relationship to their readers. We identified three stances that composers adopted in their efforts to communicate with and understand their audiences-proximal, reflexive, and reciprocal-and we demonstrated how such stances were manifested semiotically and relationally. This study contributes to a growing literature on the relationship of globalization to education and on cosmopolitanism as one response to this confluence. It demonstrates in empirical, interactional detail the complexity and challenge of learning to communicate, create, and understand across difference, as well as the potential of youth to engage those complexities ethically and to work at comprehending their subtleties. It further illuminates the centrality, for our youthful participants and their cosmopolitan project, of being able to compose in multiple and conjoined modes, and it reanimates the rhetorical construct of "audience" for digital and global times. bs_bs_banner

Current popular discussion about the role of literacy in the workplace is often based on the largely unquestioned beliefs that workers are deficient in basic literacy skills and, further, that there are clear links among illiteracy, poor job performance, and the declining economy. These assumptions lead to demands for school-based, skill-driven literacy programs tied to the workplace. In this article, Glynda Hull challenges these demands and the characterizations of workers that underlie them, suggesting that these demands are based on overly simplistic notions about literacy and its relationship to job performance and the economy. Hull argues that ethnographic research on literacy and the workplace demonstrates that the relationship between work and literacy is far more complex than the current popular discussion would have us believe. She concludes that we must pay more attention to how literacy skills are actually used in the workplace and that we can best do this by asking workers about their experiences in workplace-related instructional programs.

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