‘cooling’, or perhaps, less specifically, for ‘change’ or ‘action’. The tripod is,
however, theoretically and technically superfluous: the ice is ‘heated’ by the room
temperature - there is no Bunsen burner. The representation of the tripod is an
instance of the traditional means of representation (because of the traditional
canonical means of conducting the experiment) lingering into the new representation.
(Indeed perhaps the presence of the tripod is visual evidence of the persistent
character of the ‘old’ and ‘tradition’ as it persists more strongly on the screen than it
would on the laboratory bench.) The display of the equipment serves to visually
position the students in front of the experiment as agents in the transformation of a
solid to a liquid. The equipment places the observation clearly within the domain of
science and serves visually to link the states and suggest the potential (and the need)
to compare them.
As I will show later in this chapter in relation to the use of the CD-ROM and the
interactive whiteboard, the student and teacher interaction with the displayed
equipment serves to locate the screen in the past histories of the classroom. Through
his talk and his gesture with the screen the teacher works with the student to construct
the ‘experiment’ that is displayed on the screen as something that he has ‘set up’ and
to ‘make it real’. In doing so, the teacher attempts to locate the display on the screen
within the traditional practices of the science classroom.
The visual elements displayed on the screen are set against a flat plain pale green
background that serves to de-contextualise the image. The image offers a flat on
(frontal horizontal angle) view of the ice cube, in relation to which the viewer is
visually positioned at eye-level. At the same time the viewer is visually positioned,
through the use of vertical angle, as looking down slightly on the tripod∕stand - as
visually ‘powerful’ and therefore with the potential to act.
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