Museum Entrance

Welcome to the Lobby

1985 19952015

2005

Joel Mario ThomasMuseum of Multimodal History

Visit the CuratorVisit the Curator

Artifact1

Name of Museum

Curator Information

Joel M Thomas is the current executive director and founder of IE21CL, the Institute for the Emergence of 21st Century Literacies and a graduate student in the CCNY M.A. in Language and Literacy Program.

Back to Lobby

Name of Museum

1985

Artifact 2 Artifact 3 Artifact 4

Museum of Multimodal History

Name of Museum

When I began kindergarten, I was immersed in at least three worlds of language and literacy: an oral tradition of socio-religiosity and magical realism; a post-colonial culture where strict rules for speaking and writing were heavily policed by the power of the whip and a red-ink pen; and a new emerging digital culture ushered in by American hegemony and the advent of the MAC, the first successfully marketed line of personal computers. Back then there were no cool apps, Siri was not yet born, and autocorrect did not wreak havoc on relationships, but what Apple did do was invite us to express ourselves as individuals and more importantly to think differently. Since then, their products have continually transformed life for everyone on the planet including me, a then four year old island boy living in Trinidad whose parents saw that this was where the world was headed and wanted their son to secure a place in that future. Though, they had no way of knowing that this phenomenon would eventually inform the mobile technology we live by today as they merged with the new trends in video culture created by MTV and the digital reality in games like PAC-MAN which shaped the pre-literate behaviors of children under the age of ten who had access.

Performing Multiple Literacies

Back to Room 1