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

user does in order to ‘make or allow’ something else to happen. Action is represented
as something that the system is programmed to do in response. The setting of this
sub-level of the city represents a position familiar for many children - not out in
helicopters or alone in the street, but ‘alone’ in a house (room) and ‘working’ intently
on the floor. The representation of the user’s degree of engagement is visually
heightened here by the change in point of view and the representation of the user
(from animated character to the arm of the character).

The compositional design of the screen space is a meaning-making potential in
Toontalk. The player’s movement within the city environment of Toontalk results in
an effect of zooming-out and zooming-in to create an environment in which
‘boundaries can change and expand’. This use of space as a resource resonates with
‘game genres’ where a small portal for example can be ‘entered’ leading into a larger
space. This ‘zooming in’ from above the city, to on the street, to in the house, to on
the floor, and from the helicopter, to the animated character, to the arm of the
character are visual signs of the increasing engagement and potential for construction
available to the user. This design of screen and compositional space represents the
sub-levels within the city as a process of going deeper into a problem or activity.

The multimodal construction of rule across the four levels of the city is within the
genre of contemporary computer games. Within this genre the undermining and
subverting of ‘rules’ is the purpose of a game for many players (e.g. the use of
‘cheats’, etc.). The use of colour, texture, movement, and sound in Toontalk suggests
that ‘rules’ are a part of play and are to be ‘discovered through engagement’. The
dynamic character of the learning environment of Toontalk suggest that ‘rules’ can be
built, deconstructed, and re-built - that rules need to be tested and revised. In
Toontalk a stable notion of ‘rules’ as being concerned with right and wrong, correct
or incorrect, is replaced with a notion of rule as that which works as a more open and
creative process.

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