Guest editors' introduction to special theme issue: Multiliteracies and distance education [Malaysian Journal of Distance Education., vol. 6, no. 1]

This special theme issue of the Malaysian Journal of Distance Education provides a forum for multiple engagements with the relationships (or lack thereof) between cultural and linguistic diversity and new information communications technologies, in the context of distance education policies and practices in contemporary postcompulsory education in the Asia Pacific region. The starting point for these engagements is understanding and interrogating the concept of ‘multiliteracies’, most commonly associated with the New London Group, so-called because of a meeting of group members in New London, New Hampshire, USA in September 1994 that resulted in a seminal paper in the Spring 1996 issue of the Harvard Educational Review (http://www.alea.edu.au/multilit.htm, retrieved November 15, 2003).