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

is not possible to know the impact of the researcher and cameras on these lessons
however the impact of the study on the events recorded may be ameliorated by the
particularity of the school classroom. School classrooms differ from many other
research contexts as teachers and students are familiar with having strangers in their
classroom including OFSTED inspectors, evaluators, teacher educators, and student
teachers. Students were given the option of not being video recorded (which none of
them took up). In the end it is impossible to observe the world without being in it
without raising serious ethical issues, and the questions addressed in this thesis are of
the kind that, I want to suggest, where my presence in the classroom was unlikely to
reshape the data in significant ways.

My presence in the classroom enabled me to collect observational data. I used
observational notes to record interactions ‘off camera’, comments made by the
teacher and students, and the spatial arrangement of the classroom. This data provides
a useful reminder that video recordings (like any data) are a partial representation of
events. Alongside this video and observational data the texts made by students during
the lessons were collected. In order to explore the potentials that the students were
working with in the classroom the computer applications that were used during the
lessons were collected for analysis. Documents that were used in the lesson for
example worksheets detailing the task set by the teacher were collected, along with
documents that informed the lesson in a less direct way, such as the national
curriculum.

Sampling

Multimodal analysis is intensive in character and as a result I sampled the video data
of each series of lessons to select instances (episodes) of learning for analysis. In
order to do this I viewed the video recordings along with the observational notes to
produce a descriptive account of each lesson. These descriptive accounts include
multimodal commentary on the computer screen, curricular content, and the practices
of the students and teacher. The process of viewing the videos, and logging and

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