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

touched. The modal affordances of writing do not demand that the cause of the
change in movement - the user, the bomb, or the bars - be made explicit.

Design in Still Image Mode

The resources of drawing offer different representational affordances than those of
writing and these ‘demand’ a different representational commitment of the students.
The image is a narrative representation of an alien ‘acting on’ a little figure via the
vector produced by the line of bullets that emanate from the alien. (A vector is a line,
often diagonal, that connects objects or participants in an image. The vector expresses
a dynamic, 'doing' or 'happening' kind of relation.) In drawing, the students are
‘forced’ to depict the size, shape and features of the elements of the game: the alien,
the little figure, and the bombs. They are required to produce a differently conceived
representation of the ‘little figure’, it becomes a little animal (not much bigger than a
bullet), with two legs, two arms, two big ears, a head and a body.

The spatial affordances of image require the relations between these elements to be
specified. Through the use of the visual compositional resources, size, and detail, the
students increase the power difference between the little figure and the alien. The
alien is the most salient element in the image. This is realised by its central position
in the composition, its size - it is about eight times bigger than the little figure, the
detail of the drawing, specifically the inclusion of human-like features (eyes), and the
representation of direct eye-contact between the alien and the viewer of the image.

The affordances of drawing with pen on paper shape the students’ representation of
movement and noise. Through their drawing they visually extend the written entity
‘bounce’. They draw on the genre of time-lapse images, as the visual trace of a
sequence of movement over time, to represent the movement of the bullets∕bombs.
They represent ‘explolsion’ in a visual cartoon genre of ‘effect’, the shaking of a near
space around the little figure by a ‘wiggley’ line around the form. Through these
visual resources the entity bounce is visually represented as ‘ricochet’. The direction

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