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

icon every 2 seconds and moves through the next 14 screens. The second video clip,
in which the characters Lennie and George meet the boss of the ranch opens. Natasha
takes her hand off the mouse and both students lean back in their seats and watch the
video clip.

The students did not flick casually through the screens, talking, or looking elsewhere.
Their flicking was accompanied by intent looking, an intense engagement. The
students’ movement through the screens in this way is a form of engagement with the
novel at visual level.

The potential for animation is enabled by the origin of the images on screen - the still
frames from a film. This enables a coherent text to be produced through the encoded
conventions of film. The students’ ‘flicking’ movement through the still images of
the chapter ‘animates’ the text like a cartoon. The two students then watch the film
clips. This offers the two students ‘watching’ the novel as a visual text, different
potentials to make meaning with. As discussed earlier in this chapter, the elements on
screen, their compositional relationships, the use of representational angle, distance,
and frame, etc. combine on screen to provides a visual summary of the chapter. The
images display the sequential events of the novel: walking on the road, thirst - have
to drink from the river, going into town to an employment agency, walking again,
resting, meeting noone, tiredness, nightfall, sitting together around a fire, talking,
camping by a river. Engaging with the novel as a visual text offers a visual summary
of the themes of the novel: loneliness, hardship (e.g. sleeping outside, walk most of
day, no food, only river water to drink), and friendship. The key features of the
characters are realised visually, the images display the changing relations between the
characters, and emphasise particular emotions, and realise viewer relationships to the
characters.

127

<<   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   >>

More intriguing information