In reading the CD-ROM as a multimodal text displayed on the screen the task of the
students is to understand what they should attend to as ‘relevant’ and ‘important’.
Regardless of the technology used, reading is always a matter of the reader selecting
what she or he sees as being ‘relevant’; nonetheless the multimodal resources of the
CD-ROM and the different perspectives of the phenomena offered by the CD-ROM
serve to foreground this question and task.
As I have shown in Chapter Six, the designed relationship (or configuration) of the
multimodal resources of the screen, in particular the visual resources of colour,
texture and shape caused some difficulties for students in their interpretation of the
representation of the entity ‘states of matter’. More specifically, the difficulties in
interpretation that the students experienced using the CD-ROM appeared to be
located around the ambiguity between everyday and scientific visual representations
of the states of matter, that is, where the principles of representation stood in contrast
to the students everyday readings of the visual world. For example, the visual
representation of the particles in the state of matter of liquid were interpreted not as
an alternative representation of a liquid, but rather as ‘a part of the liquid’ in which
the particles are ‘held like in a jelly’. The representation of the transformation from a
gas to a liquid uses a bubble texture to represent boiling water and a small blue circle
to represent gas particles. This visual difference led some students to separate the
entity ‘particles’ from the state itself and led them to suggest that liquid and gas have
different kinds of particles rather than to focus on the change in the arrangement and
movement of the particles across states of matter.
The students reading of the visual representations in ways other than intended by the
designers is not, as I have argued throughout this thesis, a matter of their ‘inability’ to
interpret the visual, rather it is that they are using different principles than the
designers to interpret the CD-ROM. In the case of the visual representation of the
change in states from a liquid to a solid for instance, the students principles for
interpreting the visual resources of colour, texture, shape and image are based on the
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