described as more often realising that which can be ‘seen’ in the world, our
‘everyday’ experiences of ‘how things are’, although in the case of the CD-ROM
Multimedia Science School movement is also used to represent scientific theory
(particle theory) as an ‘everyday’ phenomenon. In the applications discussed in this
thesis, visual communication appears to fullfill a mediating function between these
two domains of the everyday and of specialised school knowledge. Visual
communication straddles the two domains of the everyday and scientific versions of
the world, the world as students experience it and the world as it is represented in
school knowledge. In this way visual representations on the screen appear to act as a
scaffold which offers students a way into school knowledge.
Just as modes appear differently in the traditional school Science classroom than they
do in the English classroom (Kress et. al., 2001; SEP 2002), the analysis presented in
this thesis suggests that this modal difference holds true for technology-mediated
learning. For instance, writing appears to have a different genre and function in the
case of the English CD-ROM as compared with Maths and Science. The writing (and
speech) in the English application addresses the 'audience' directly, in the form of a
narrative and presents Steinbeck and the novel as central to the school subject
English. In contrast, the Maths and Science application contains little writing. What
writing there is on screen is in the form of lists, factual statements, classifications,
definitions and instruction rather than that of a narrative form. In these cases writing
functions to ‘name’ the visual.
The use of image in the applications also varies, in relation to context, colour, style,
and use of symbolic icons. In the images of the Steinbeck CD-ROM a limited range
of colours is used, the colours are muted (un-saturated) and the style of the image is
that of a hand-drawn illustration (in fact a transformation of film stills in an
application similar to Photo-shop). This use of colour and style serves to associate the
images in the CD-ROM with the genre of literary illustration often found in a printed
book. The icons used in the CD-ROM, the ‘spotlight’ style images of actors, the
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