Medium and Screen
In order to understand how technology contributes to learning I argue that it is
necessary to understand how the medium shapes the semiotic potentials available,
and how these potentials are actualised through students’ engagement with them. In
short, the facilities of the medium need to be drawn into the analysis.
Technology enters fundamentally into the semiotic process: through
the kinds of meaning which it facilitates or favours, and through the
differential access to the means of productions and reception which it
provides.
(ICress and van Leeuwen, 1996: 233)
One way to do this is to understand the relationship between mode and medium as
one between technologies of representation (the modes of ‘multimodality’) and
technologies of dissemination (the media of multimediality). Medium refers to how
texts are disseminated, such as printed book, CD-ROM, and other kinds of computer
application. The facilities of the media are ‘parallel’ to the affordances of the mode.
This raises questions of what it is readily and easily possible to do with a medium.
The facilities of the media of computer applications (e.g. CD-ROMs, computer
programming applications, hypertext, websites, etc.) have the potential to use a range
of Communicational and representational modes, to enable easy movement between
applications, for interactivity, and hypermodality.
It is important to note that although the facilities (potentials) of a medium contribute
in crucial ways to the constraints and possibilities for realising meaning these
facilities do not determine it. Meaning is realised by the sign-makers 'design'
(arrangement and selection) of the potentials afforded by a medium, and the social
context of their use. The use of this potential depends on the purpose, intention, and
context of the application. For example, pre-school books use image, writing,
movement and sound, they include interactive potential (push here, pull there),
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