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

made available to them in order to make sense of the representation of the entity
bounce on screen.

These changes can be understood as the move from a matter of interpretation to a
matter of design. The students’ design of the game is an outcome of the modal
affordances of the resources of Toontalk, their interactions with the researcher, their
everyday experiences∕understanding of bounce, their original idea, and their game
playing (and palpable disappointments with programming through this). Through
their interaction with the spatial dimensions of the screen (a resource of Toontalk) the
students create spaces for different kinds of activity. Through gesture on the screen
they create an ‘imagined space overlaying the screen’ in which the students ‘place’
things where they want them and imagine their movement. This ‘planning space’
‘connects’ the students and the Toontalk in terms of an imagined game. The students’
use of the screen as a space serves to delineate between the practices involved in
making a game (the practices of constructing objects and code) and those of playing a
game.

Through this modal reconfiguration of potentials for meaning the learner is re-
positioned from being a re-producer of knowledge to producer of knowledge.
Toontalk is realised within a highly sensory animated cartoon∕game genre. This
enables the user to work with principles of game and via the mediating tools of the
program (e.g. the robots, Wandy, Bammer) to engage with mathematical concepts.
The user is engaged in the iterative work of transforming her or his understanding and
experiences of the everyday into the mathematical (and vice versa) - both ‘versions’
of rules are enabled to ‘co-exist’ within the system. 1 suggest that the genre of
computer-based learning environments brings forth (provides the potentials for)
different genres of engagement with them (Jewitt, 2002).

208

<<   206   207   208   209   210   211   212   >>

More intriguing information