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

representation of bounce from the everyday to the scientific in Toontalk is realised in
the difference between the coding-orientation of the two representations of bounce.
This is realised through the shift from the bright primary colours and the ‘lego-like’
texture associated with play to the darker colours and flat decontextualised texture
associated with technical imagery, together with the introduction of mathematical
symbols and the backgrounding of movement as a mode. The mode of image, the
image of the spring, mediates these two spaces (image plays a similar mediating role
in the case in the Steinbeck CD-ROM). These multimodal representations of the
entity bounce provide the students with the potential for multiple readings and
simultaneously to hold both everyday and scientific accounts of a phenomenon.

Reshaping the Practices of Students in School Mathematics

In the process of designing and building their game the students engaged in a range of
activity including the construction and deconstruction of rules, hypothesising and
prediction, and explanation and problem solving. The multimodal resources of the
Toontalk environment were central in how the students engaged in these practices.

In building their game the students created different spaces through their gesture and
gaze with∕at the screen itself and through their interaction and organisation of the
elements displayed on the screen. These different spaces they created through this
activity drew distinctions between different kinds of practices that the students were
engaged with, that is game design, game playing, game construction, and the saving
of games. In their creation and use of these spaces the students set up a creative
rhythm between their different kinds of activities which served to create a distinction
between game planning, design and construction, and game playing. The students
gestured ‘on’ the screen to produce a plan of the game. Through their use of gesture
and gaze in this way the students connected their imagined idealised game with the
resources of Toontalk. The temporary and ephemeral affordance of gesture and gaze
as modes enabled the plan of the game to remain fluid and ambiguous. The students
then selected and constructed the game on screen. When working with the resources

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