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

It is more useful, I want to suggest, to reconsider the notion of literacy itself as one of
multimodal design as this reflects the ‘reality’ that modes are fully integrated, that
there is not, and never has been, a purely linguistic text as writing is itself multimodal
(Kenner, in press). What there has been, is an educational focus on language, a
privileging of language over other modes, other modes that have always been present
but not always attended to (especially within educational research). To talk of
multimodal literacy is to attend to all that is going on, including the visual character
of writing (font, layout, colour), to listen to the ‘breathiness’, the tone, the pitch, the
voice quality of speech and to understand these as semiotic resources (meaning
potentials). Conceptions of literacy need to be expanded beyond language to all
modes and the static notion of literacy as the acquisition of sets of competencies
needs to be replaced with a notion of literacy as a dynamic process through which
students use and transform multimodal signs and design new meanings.

The Multimodal Character of Learning

In this thesis I have attempted to show how learning can be understood as a dynamic
process of sign making and how the multimodal signs that students make can be seen
as a realisation of their interests, embedded in the demands of the classroom and the
school curriculum. I have rejected a sole focus on technology-mediated learning as
verbal interaction in favour of an approach that attends to the full range of modes that
contribute to this process of meaning making. From this perspective I argue that the
multimodal resources of the screen can be understood as a set of potentials for
meaning making and I have shown that the configuration of these multimodal
resources on screen is central to what students can do (mean) with them. I have
demonstrated that curriculum knowledge is shaped differently by the affordances of
different modes, and that when students engage with the multimodal signs on screen
in the process of learning, they Ieam not only from the words and speech but from a
range of modes. The question of what to attend to, what to ‘make meaningful’ is a
significant aspect of the work of students in relation to multimodal texts, in other
words, the question of what to select as salient to the task at hand. In the relative

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