representations of Science, embedded in scientific realism are overlaid onto the
naturalistic representation of the world. The task of the students is transformed from a
matter of moving from the realism of the everyday to the realism of the scientific (in
which the latter ‘replaces’ the former), to the task of distinguishing between and
comparing these two ‘accounts’ of the world. This representation and the choice of
viewing positions (to ‘view particles’ or to ‘hide particles’) impacts on the way in which
students can engage with the entity ‘particle’, and offers different potentials for learning.
The similarities and differences between the multimodal representation of curriculum
knowledge and realism in the different subjects of English, Mathematics and Science is
an area that I intend to explore in the future by building on this thesis and analysing more
examples of technology-mediated learning. At this point it is only possible to comment
on these similarities and differences in an exploratory manner.
The analysis presented in this thesis suggests that the multimodal representations of
curriculum entities and the semiotic construction of realism on screen across the three
subject areas of school English, Mathematics and Science have a number of similarities.
Broadly speaking, these multimodal representations offer, at least potentially, different
entry points into the curriculum, offer the potential to reshape entities in significant ways,
reposition students to the construction of knowledge, and mediate (primarily visually) the
conceptual ‘gap’ between everyday and scientific concepts and domains in new ways.
There also appear to be some interesting differences in how modes are configured on
screen across the three subject areas. In particular, the ways in which modes are
configured on screen, their ‘prominence’ and the relationships between modes differs
between the subject areas. While language - speech and writing - is increasingly de-
centred on the screen this is, unsurprisingly, more the case in school Mathematics and
Science than in English. The function of writing on screen differs across the subjects. In
Mathematics and Science writing is primarily used to name the canonical curriculum
entities within the specialised language of the subject. In English it is used more fully to
represent the concepts of the curriculum, although in the case of the Steinbeck CD-ROM
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