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

The Elements of the Screen: The ‘Frame’

The ‘frame’ around the ‘screen within the screen’ provides a variety of means by
which the display in the central screen can be changed. It includes three panels with
keys or buttons displayed on each of these panels, which relate to the content of the
screen (see figure 6.4). The three elements of the ‘frame’ discussed below are the
‘topic keys’ on the left panel, and the ‘content keys’, the ‘hide/view particle key’ and
the graph displayed on the right-hand panel.

Colour is used to distinguish between the ‘frame’ and the ‘screen within the screen’.
The colours used in the ‘frame’ are muted and dark and use several shades of grey.
These colours are dense and flat. This use of colour serves as a sign of the ‘weight’
and the ‘seriousness’ of the ‘frame’ and to locate it within the coding orientation of
‘scientificness’. Regardless of the menu topic that is chosen, the ‘frame’ remains the
same. The visual permanence of the ‘frame’, together with this use of colour, is a sign
of its authority. The lack of saturated colour in the ‘frame’ serves to neutralise and
background it and it serves to draw attention away from it. The grey tones of
machinery, the panels of buttons and keys, and the flatness of its texture combine to
present the ‘frame’, and more broadly speaking the science that it represents, as a
kind of ‘technology of control’.

The elements included in the ‘frame’ are ‘stripped back’ to the essential detail of their
technical function, and to nothing more. These elements are displayed in conventional
scientific forms, as ‘graph’ and ‘labels’, and with a focus on classification. Overall,
the outer ‘frame’ of the screen (represented in figure 6.6 in grey-scale) quite literally
provides a ‘frame’ for the activity displayed in the central screen-within-a-screen. It
indicates ‘what is to be attended to’ by the student.

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