Designing learning with tools for monitoring metasemiotic awareness

This chapter focuses on the design of learning informed by tools that can measure and monitor metasemiotic awareness in individuals and groups. It focuses on the application of these tools not only to design learning but also to design further pedagogic research with the data output. As such, these can be seen as: a pedagogical aid for designing learning paths and strategies directed at multiliteracy development in individuals and small groups, an assessment device to monitor student progress, a means for measuring the effectiveness of courses and approaches to multimodal literacy and multiliteracies in general, and a mechanism for wider data collection on multisemiotic awareness and multimodal literacy in larger cohorts. These last two aspects of quantitative assessment and data collection have the potential to validate the design of pedagogic approaches to literacy. This can influence the activation (or maintenance) of courses, and also the financing of larger initiatives at the institutional and national levels.