motivate the use of the signs ‘restricted’ and ‘free’ versus ‘move a bit not much’ are
different. The former is motivated by the epistemology of science and the later by the
epistemology of the everyday. In other words the student’s interpretation and
description of the movement of the particles can be understood as a sign of their
epistemological position to the phenomenon ‘states of matter’.
The Written Resources on the Screen
The students’ engagement with resources of the CD-ROM suggests that they do not
interpret the events within the screen via the written labels on the ‘frame’. For
instance, when working with the transformation from a liquid to a solid the writing on
the ‘frame’ of the screen clearly indicates what it is that they are observing in the
screen within the screen and yet their interpretation of this is not informed by the
written label. They rely solely on the two visual modes of image and colour to ‘read’
the transformation. In short, the students do not ‘take up’ the information that the
scientific ‘frame’ of the CD-ROM offers them. This is, I argue, an instance where the
conceptual ‘gap’ between the different modal representations on the ‘frame’ and the
‘screen within the screen’. I argue that it is also an example of the dominance of the
visual mode on the ‘screen within the screen’ and a de-centring of the role of written
language on framing the screen. (Of course some students may not read these two
elements in the way that they are designed to be read, that is together as a multimodal
text.)
The Display of ‘Hide Particles’ or ‘View Particles’ in the ‘Screen within a
Screen’
The potential to either hide or view the ‘particles’ in each of the multimodal
representations of the states and the changes to states demands the students select and
move between different epistemological views of the phenomena. For instance,
selecting the ‘View Particles’ option means that the representation shifts from a
specific common sense representation of a solid, that is, ice, to a theoretically
informed multimodal representation of the state ‘solid’ - as ‘particles’ moving around
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