empirical reality of their everyday observations and experiences. In contrast, the
designers’ use of these modes appears to be based on the concept of density,
compactness and inertia.
In addition to the differing principles of designers and students for reading the
specific modes, analysis of the students’ use of the CD-ROM suggests that designers
and students bring different strategies and principles to the reading of the modal
configurations of the screen. The designers of texts such as the CD-ROM
Multimedia Science School consider the displays on the screen as multimodal
ensembles. As such, they are likely to see the meaning of the visual modes of colour
and image as interpreted ‘through or in relation to’ the written elements on the screen.
Observation of the students’ use of the CD-ROM Multimedia Science School shows
that some students do not engage with all of the modal resources of the screen in
order to make sense of the displays in the ‘screen within a screen’. In short, some
students do not read all modes as being meaningful, and in making sense of the
multimodal texts of the screen they rely more on the visual modes, image and colour,
than they do on the modes of writing and movement. (Chapters Four and Five suggest
that the modal preferences of students also contribute to technology-mediated
learning in school English and Mathematics.) I argue that the students ‘trust’ the
empirical evidence of the visual modes more than the other modes and that they draw
on these visual modes to ‘untangle’ the ambiguities between the everyday and the
scientific representations that they are presented with on the screen.
The students reading of the resources of movement on the screen is as a general
signifier of ‘change’. However, in some instances the students appear to be unable to
link the resources of movement with a specific meaning or sign in relation to the
representation of the entity ‘states of matter’. The student’s ability to interpret the
meaning of movement is restricted by their understanding of the theoretical entities
that the signs relate to and more generally their knowledge of the multimodal genres
of school science. In the move from the ‘hide particles’ viewing option to the ‘view
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