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

be understood as a result of the students’ trust of the colour and image and their
positioning of these two modes as empirical evidence within the CD-ROM. The
students consider change in colour as a criterial aspect of the transformation. Year
seven students are at an early stage of their induction into the realism of school
science. Perhaps as a result, the students are faced with the challenge of ‘reading’
and untangling the tensions between the everyday and the scientific representations
that the CD-ROM offers them. I want to suggest that some of the students were
therefore more inclined to make sense of certain aspects of the representations that
they were offered via image and colour from the perspective of their knowledge and
experience of the everyday world. Even when the students were able to read the
transformation multimodally, as intended by the designers of the CD-ROM, as a
change from a liquid to a solid, they commented on the change in colour, writing for
example T can see the colour change’.

The Resources of Movement on Screen

The modal resources of movement are central to how the curriculum entities ‘states of
matter’, ‘solid’, ‘liquid’, ‘gas’ and ‘particles’ are constructed in the ‘View Particles’
option of the CD-ROM. Within the modal resource of movement, the features of
speed, fixedness and freedom (of movement) and direction are used to represent these
entities. Although the modal resources of movement are central to the design of the
CD-ROM and the representation of the entities, these resources were not central to all
of the students’ engagement with the CD-ROM (their interpretation of it) or their
construction of the entities. The main function of movement in the students ‘reading’
of the CD-ROM is to signify change and to draw attention to the specific
arrangements of ‘particles’ in the different states and the need to attend to the process
of transformation from one state to another. In this way the resources of movement
link one ‘state’ to another and in doing so this offers a new potential to generalise the
entity ‘particles’ beyond a specific state of matter. In the move from the ‘Hide
Particles’ viewing option to the ‘View Particles’ viewing option the modal resources
of movement represent both the empirical phenomena, such as the movement of

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