Learning with video representation: A case study on the usage of multimodal elements for explaining community issues

School is under debate on the shifting from teaching to learning under global technological development and society’s demand on workforce. At one hand, school is more or less the same as before with long history of curriculum designed on various fixed boundary subjects. On the other hand, catalyzed by the rapid development of information and communication technology, students are familiar with multimodal reading and representation on community issues across disciplines beyond classroom. As students are now digital natives who show great interests to communicate with social media, the multimodal representation used in social media is introduced back to school activities together with traditional literacy development on reading and writing. This paper is going to present a case study on six Hong Kong grade 10 students’ learning with creating video artifacts integrating multimodal elements to explain community issues. Three levels of student performance in written examination results were compared with respect to the usage of multimodal elements and multiliteracies development. It is found that the students’ written examination performance is not in correlation with performance in using multimodal elements for meaning representation on community issues as well as the development of multiliteracies. Copyright © 2014 Journal of Communication and Education.