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

comes to have meanings as a culture selects and draws these into meaning making.
These materials (e.g. sound and light) have qualities that affect how they can be
culturally shaped into modes, how they can realise meanings. The materiality of a
mode contributes to how a mode is shaped through people’s social use of it; and this
has led to the concept of modal affordance.

Modal Affordance

The affordance of a mode can be understood as what it is possible to express and
represent readily, and easily with a mode given its materiality and given its cultural
and social history - what it has been used to do (mean). Where a mode ‘comes from’
in its history of cultural work, its provenance, is understood by members of that
culture, and becomes a part of its affordance. The affordances of image, in the form
of graphic marks on a two-dimensional surface for example, offer different potentials
for the expression and representation of meaning than the affordances of speech, in
the form of sounds over time. The specific semiotic resources of modes are
‘essentially incommensurable’ (Lemke, 2002).

No [written] text is an image. No text or visual representation means
in all and only the same ways that text can mean. It is this essential in
commensurability that enables genuine new meanings to be made
from the combinations of modalities.

(Lemke, 2002: 303)

The question of what image is ‘best’ for, and what words and their arrangements are
‘best’ for, is raised by the concept of affordance (Lanham, 2001). Each mode
possesses a specific logic and provides different Communicational and
representational potentials (Dicks and Mason, 1998; Jehng et. al, 1999). The sounds
of speech for instance happen in time, and this sequence in time shapes what can be
done with (speech) sounds. The logic of sequence in time is unavoidable for speech:
one sound has to be uttered after another, one word after another, one syntactic and
textual element after another. This sequence is an affordance: it produces the

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