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

Multimodal Literacy

Government educational policy (e.g. The Literacy Strategy and the National
Curriculum) does not address the problematic and contentious character of literacy
and the struggle over its meaning (Brookes and Goodwyn, 1998). While recent
government initiatives seem determined to focus on the concept of literacy in its most
restricted sense, outside of the school young people are “ ‘reading’ and ‘writing’
across a new terrain, redefining what literacy might mean.” (Raney, 1998: 37). In this
thesis I argue that there is a need to conceptualise literacy more broadly as a matter of
multimodal design.

While the visual and the linguistic can be treated as distinct versions of literacy to be
attended to, that is visual literacy and written literacy, what is needed I argue in this
thesis is not the addition of the visual but the re-thinking of the whole complex of
representation. Kress (2000) argues for the need to have a concept of literacy as a
multimodal process in which all modes are critically interpreted, and their
interactions considered. This leads to a shift from a conception of competence in
literacy to one of literacy as multimodal 'design'. There is a need for a means of
talking about this ‘new literacy’ about what we do when we read and produce images
(Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). New technologies make available a whole range of
multimodal possibilities for individuals’ production of documents (layout, colour,
scanned images, use of tables, word art, sound, and so on) and allow new kinds of
‘reading’ of texts (Bum and Reed, 1999). The learning processes when working with
new technologies require ‘substantially different literacies’ which relate to the
different character of texts that students need to work with (Downes and Zammit,
2000). To continue to think of learning only in terms of writing and speech is
therefore problematic.

As images are a central part of the communicative environment it has become
increasingly important to be able to ‘read’ images. In '... a media-text, and symbol

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