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

The body posture of students is a significant aspect of their engagement with screen.
As I have shown in this thesis, a student’s body posture, their physical habitus, can be
interpreted as a Signifier of their ‘genre’ of engagement. To lean back in a seat and
view the screen is a material realisation of a different subjectivity, a different learning
experience, than an upright posture with the hand on the mouse: the former is a
posture of ‘leisure’ and the later one of ‘study’. I am not suggesting that either is
more positive in relation to learning, merely that they mark the different ‘position’ of
the student at that particular moment of engaging with a text.

This move beyond a focus on language alone and attention to the multimodal activity
of students with the screen enables different kinds of learning, engagement and
students’ production of ‘learning spaces’ to be bought into the analytical frame. This
includes the ‘non-linguistic’ work of planning and thinking, making and constructing,
playing and reviewing, and moving through and transforming texts as a part of
learning. As students often say nothing as they work on the computer, especially
those who have a shared history of working together (Crook, 1999), moving beyond
language is important, I argue, as it re-theorises much of what goes on with and
around computers as potential learning.

Multimodal Literacy

Technology-mediated learning provides teachers and students (and indeed it
demands) with new forms of engagement which, in turn, require new conceptions of
school literacy and literacy practices.

As the analysis of technology-mediated learning in this thesis has shown, students are
engaged in the work of interpreting and making meaning with a whole range of
modes, image, writing, animated movement, colour, sound-effect, music and the
configuration of these modes on screen. (Indeed this is always the case in the
classroom, although differently so on screen.) Students and teachers are involved in

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