Escritura multimodal y multimedial: Un estudio acerca de las representaciones sociales de estudiantes universitarios de carreras de la salud en Chile

Unlike university students 25 years ago, today's students are faced with devices, contents, and technologies which challenge them to constantly update their competencies. This scenario gives them opportunities, in relation to media and modes, to construct meaning. In college, students engage in academic work which requires both multimodal and multimedial competency. This article describes the social representations of multimodal and multimedial writing which Chilean students in health-related fields display in the new technological context. We applied a survey to a sample of 255 students in health studies. The findings indicate that social representations on multimodal and multimedial writing are restricted, in other words they see writing as essentially anchored to the verbal mode and have limited awareness of the value of multimodal and multimedial elements in their written texts.