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

From Roles to Resources

In order to better understand the multimodal character of new technologies and its
potential for learning, I have shown that rather than identifying the typical∕conventional
roles of modes (image, sound-effect, writing, colour, gesture, gaze and movement on
screen) as other research has done, it is important to explore how these roles are realised.
In the thesis I ‘step-back’ in order to identify the range of semiotic resources which these
modes make available, and the interaction of these resources on screen, to ask how they
are currently used to mean but also to ask how these could be designed to realise
meaning. Shifting the analytical focus from the roles that modes tend to occupy on screen
to a focus on the semiotic potential of modes is useful in two important ways. First, this
shift in attention makes the choice of mode and modal resource central. This enables an
analysis, as I have done in this thesis, which examines modal resources in relation to the
curriculum and to explore how the move from one mode to another reconfigures and
reshapes curriculum knowledge and experiences of learning. This explicit focus on the
semiotic potentials of modes enables a more articulate process of design in which the
question of what resources an application might offer students for thinking and making
meaning can be clearly addressed. Second, it enables the multimodal potentials of the
learning environment of new technologies to be ‘untied’ from convention (what has gone
before) in order to explore how these can be newly configured on screen. This second
point is particularly important as so much of what has gone before relate to the medium
of print and the domain of the printed-page, not to the facilities of new technology and
computers and the site of the screen.

The work of linguists and discourse analysts serves to identify the specific resources of
language - speech and writing - in ways that have shaped the common-sense that informs
how educational practitioners and the designers of teaching resources use language. In a
similar way this thesis describes the resources of image, colour, sound-effect, writing,
speech, and movement and the configuration of these resources on screen. In this way
the analytical tools developed within the thesis provide a potential resource for
educational practitioners and the designers of multimodal software applications to talk
and think about the use and configuration of modes in such applications.

298

<<   296   297   298   299   300   301   302   >>

More intriguing information