A Multimodal Framework for Computer Mediated Learning: The Reshaping of Curriculum Knowledge and Learning

In the instance discussed here, the teacher had focused on the entity character in the
course work that she had set the class. The course work set was to write ‘a day in the
life’ of a character from Of Mice and Men (1937). The students had to select a
character of their choice for this work.

The focus on character in both official documents and policy documents and in
classroom versions of English indicates the importance of understanding how
character is realised in the CD-ROM. I give an overview of the content and structure
of the CD-ROM in the next section. I describe the multimodal reshaping of the
characters firstly in the ‘Novel as CD-ROM’ and secondly in the Dossier section of
the CD-ROM. Through this analysis I show that the traditional notion of character
described above is also reshaped (gets a new form) in the move from page to screen. I
return to the question of what this reshaped character might mean for learning later in
the chapter.

Overview of the CD-ROM

The CD-ROM version of, Of Mice and Men, is organised into five parts: Novel as
CD-ROM, Biography, Map, Diary, and Dossier. Each of these parts of the CD-ROM
is selected from the opening screen. These five parts of the CD-ROM draw on a range
of modal resources in order to focus on discrete aspects of the study of a text.

The ‘Novel as CD-ROM’ offers two viewing options titled - ‘Text’ and ‘Visual’. The
Text option, as the title suggests, is a written text. The other option, even though it is
called the ‘Visual’ option, is actually multimodal. The ‘Visual ‘ option consists of
video clips, audio clips and screens with still images and writing. It also includes a
character guide, Bindy, in the form of video clips of an actor, which offers a spoken
commentary at various points. In addition there are visual hyperlinks (in the form of
words circled in red, italicised, or underlined) which link to other sections of the CD-
ROM (such as the Map part of the CD-ROM, or commentary on the text).

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