Mural.ly: Visual Essays for intermediate EFL Students

My intermediate EFL Korean university students are using Mural.ly to create collaborate visual essays on culture. We learned four different components of culture: universal, specific, transcultural, and localized. They used Mural.ly to identify, illustrate, and explain how the different parts of culture interact/overlap.

Their final project on culture was to create a visual essay that compared and contrasted transcultural and localization. Transcultural is an idea/object that is imported from another culture. Localization is when a culture takes that idea/object and makes it uniquely their own.

The hard work of Group 3: Kim Seoul Yeon, Kim SeHee, & Kim In Jae

The collaborative visual essay process on apps like Mural.ly, if structured properly, facilitates students learning visual literacy, critical thinking skills, and the creative process.

None of the students have done anything like a visual essay before. Today, they discussed how this course design is the exact opposite of their Korean education. I explained to them that when you are first learning this kind of visual processing it is like me asking, “Can you please tell me where the air begins and the sky ends?” But eventually, they will begin to be able to identify the different kinds of clouds, air molecules, what the different color of the skies mean…eventually, they can see where the sky ends and the air begins.

The hard work of Group 3: Kim Seoul Yeon, Kim SeHee, & Kim In Jae

Next, we are going to learn about “remixing.” They are going to find out the sky and air are inseparably interconnected together - just like they thought it was in the first place. We are coming full circle with a new kind of clarity.

During this initial learning period about remixing, the students will write and comment on each others’ blogs. I consider this online journaling. We will use Blogger for its user-friendly interface, but the discussion will monitored similarly to a Blackboard discussion. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about netiquette as they students are quite lovely.

We began the remix discussion early by watching this video (as in follow this link) that shows one of their favorite western action movies (Matrix) was actually an American localization of a transcultural movie genre created by their neighbors (and refined by the Korean film industry as well).