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

the realisation of meaning through modes. While modes have different potentials for
realising meaning all modes are resources available to realise meaning, all modes can
represent the world, represent interactions, and can be used to form messages. The
representational and Communicational affordance of modes is the outcome of
complex social shaping of the materiality of modes in their social usage (resulting in
functional specialisation and load) and the designed relationships between modes.

Mode

A mode can be thought of as any regularized organized set of semiotic resources for
articulating meaning. Modes are broadly understood to be the result of the effect of
the work of culture in shaping material into resources for representation. These
resources display regularities due to that cultural work and due to their more or less
frequent use in social (inter) action. The more work a culture has put into such a
resource, for whatever reasons, and the more it has been used in the social life of a
particular community, the more fully and finely articulated it will have become.
Through this use the semiotic resources of modes come to have regularities of use.
These regularities are what have been called ‘grammars’ traditionally.

For instance, the resources of the visual mode (e.g. diagrams, pictures, icons, and
symbols) offer a collection of potentials or resources for making meaning. These
include the depiction of participants, vectors, setting - the type and the degree of
Contextualisation, visual props, the use of angle and perspective, detail or absence of
detail, depth, the position of elements in space, salience, and framing. Through
people’s use of them these resources have come to have meaning. (The semiotic
resources of still image, colour, animated movement, gaze, and so on, are discussed
in detail in Chapter Three.)

Materiality

Materiality is the physical character of that what a culture provides as materials for
making meaning. Materiality is everywhere and the physical materiality of a resource

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