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

student is an observer of the investigation displayed on screen, and acts on the CD-
ROM, and not on the elements on screen. By selecting the temperature setting, the
student activates the series of sequences in the multimodal representations displayed
on the screen. There is an interesting confusion of the agency of the students within
the CD-ROM in that the graph both visually positions the students as observers and
as the agents of change. It would have been possible to design the interface to make it
explicit that the role of the student is to move on the multimodal display; that this is
not the case suggests that another interest overrides this logic of agency. I want to
suggest that it is the demands of the curriculum, the need to foreground that the
changes in state being displayed come about through heating and cooling; and this
demand has shaped the designed agency of the students. The use of the temperature
setting draws attention to the ‘active agent within the system’ - increase and decrease
in temperature.

When working with the CD-ROM the students construct their agency in different
ways. The students’ responses to the worksheet questions show that some of the
students construct themselves as active agents in the investigation by linking their
actions with the display of the transformations from one state to another while other
students construct themselves as observers of the investigation. This different
positioning of agency can be seen in the students’ response, for example to the
following question on the worksheet concerning the change from a liquid to a solid:

Increase the temperature in the same way you did before. What can
you see happen to the particles? How do you think this has happened?
Have you done anything to make this happen?

One student, Lucy, responded ‘Because I have raised the temperature the particles
form into a liquid and move freely’. Another student, Jemima, commented, ‘The
particles are moving about a lot. Because the ice has melted it isn’t a solid so it isn’t
packed tightly the particles. I didn’t do anything.’ While another student, Kylie,
wrote, ‘I’ve increased the temputure so they move more. I think this has happened

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