This Presentation reports on findings from a study of 17 New Zealand families Skyping with far-away family members.I will begin by examining the statement “it’s just like being there in person” made by one of our participants and delve into the ‘if and when’ the computer becomes ubiquitous in family videoconferencing interactions. Utilising the theoretical/analytical notions of modal density, modal configurations, and the foreground-background continuum of attention awareness, I will illustrate how videoconferencing is integrated into everyday family life and demonstrate how families make use of this technology to stay close. Next, I will unpack the complexity by examining the rhythms and time scales in international videoconferences and illustrate that by examining time cycles (such as the entropic cycle, which is the formation and decay of material substances; the solar cycle, which is the 365-day revolution of the earth around the sun; or the circadian cycle, which is the 24-hour rotation of the moon around the earth), we in fact can discover (INTER)ACTION CYCLES, that appear almost unnoticeably in everyday (inter)actions as they originated in far earlier time scales than the ongoing videoconferencing family (inter)action. The discovery of (inter)action cycles as well as the discovery of multiple overlapping and not-overlapping real or experienced rhythms allow us to examine complexities that question an easy use of videoconferencing technology in international education as well as in international work place communications.

When studying interactions in pedagogic settings, we want to gain an in-depth understanding of the micro actions. But we also want to understand how the micro actions connect to practices, and how they link to larger discourses.

Multimodal (inter)action analysis is a framework that brings together detailed analysis of micro actions with analysis of practices and discourses that participants draw on as they perform the actions and interactions.

With examples from family video conferences, an elementary school classroom, and an art school, I demonstrate what can be learned when using this multimodal framework for the analysis of interactions in pedagogic situations.

This is a hands-on workshop in which participants will learn how to transcribe multimodal action and interactionin a replicable and reliable way. Working through offered excerpts, we will learn to first discern hand-arm movements, postural shifts, gaze shifts, and much more, and then learn to combine all of the individual modal transcripts in order to develop a final multimodal transcript that reliably illustrates complex actions and interactions.

The term mode is shown to be theoretically useful when dissecting complex actions. Mode, defined as a system ofmediated action, is however, delineated by the individual researcher according to the data piece under scrutiny. Individual modes, as we will learn, in fact tell us little about an interaction. Only when a final transcript is produced that reliably explicates the multiplicity of ongoing actions, can we understand always complex (inter)actions.

This PhD course explores multimodal analysis from a multimodal mediated perspective. With mediated discourse theory (Scollon, 1998, 2001) building the theoretical core, multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 20111) explores the actions that people perform and links these to the practices that the actions draw upon and re-produce or change.

More specifically the course will examine the following areas:

• Video data and analyse the lower-level, higher-level and frozen actions that participants perform.
• Using the site of engagement (Scollon, 1998) as analytical tool, the actions are then further analysed as linked to practices.
• The term practice is here used in Scollon’s (2001) sense and is defined as an action with a history.

The course delves into analysing video data from a multimodal mediated (inter)action analytical point of view. The students will learn the basic units of analysis, the mediated action (Wertsch, 1998; Scollon, 1998), the lower-level, higher-level and frozen mediated action (Norris (2004), the site of engagement (Scollon, 2001; Norris, 2014), and practice (Scollon, 2001).

With this theoretical and analytical background, the students will then be lead to conduct their own analysis either using their own data or using data made available by VILA.

The workshop will form a pre-conference activity of the annual Association of Visual Pedagogy Conference and will be supported through resources provided through DIGHUMLAB.