expected and required. Movement is used to construct the entity rule and its potential
for movement, and is a constant metaphor for the making of rules such as animated
hammers, robots and other tools populate the screen.
The modal resources of colour, image, movement and sound effect available in
Toontalk require the students to re-specify the elements of the game: to fill in the
concept of the game narrative. The visual design of the game does not only fulfil a
decorative function, but is a crucial aspect of the game design which brings forth
particular discourses of game and rule which in turn shape the interaction of the
students with the screen as a text. In the move from page to screen the students are
involved in the transduction of knowledge between modes, the representation of
movement as static image and the representation of sound as visual image.
The Reshaping of Curriculum Entities in School Science
Image and movement are central to the learning of school science in the classroom
and the construction of curriculum entities, the introduction of new technologies and
the move from the page to the screen, however, reconfigures these modes in ways
that are significant for the construction of curriculum entities. In the case of the
construction of the entities ‘states of matter’ and ‘particles’ the work of bringing the
entities into existence in the classroom is transformed. The task of animating the
arrangement and movement of the particles in each ‘state’ is traditionally realised by
the gesture and drawings of the teacher. In the move from page to screen the
potentials of movement made available by the CD-ROM Multimedia Science School
realise this aspect of the entity particles, and in doing so the agency of the particles
and their ‘empirical reality’ is established. Traditionally, as I have shown in Chapter
Six, teachers focus on discrete ‘states of matter’ and the arrangement of ‘particles’ in
these states, however, the modal resources of image and gestured ‘demonstrations’ of
the movement of particles are limited in the realisation of the transformation from one
‘state of matter’ to another. On screen the semiotic resources of image and
movement are foregrounded and offer the potential to display the changes that occur
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