In the last sixty years the literacy environment based on alphabetic technology has almost completely transcended into the electronic environment based on digital technology. The traditional literacy-based classrooms and school libraries as centres of knowledge and education may have still retained their physical existence but have lost their foundation and purpose. The changes brought about by the digital environment have forced the traditional classroom and its literate environment emphasizing the importance of speaking, reading and writing to search for new meaning. While most educators are still clutching to the straw of the traditional literacy-based classroom by inventing more and more amusing presentations, the signs of traditional classroom's crisis are more and more visible. The physical classroom has competed and has lost to virtual reality which is instantaneous, transferable and imminently involving, the traditional school with textbooks seems to be a museum relic to contemporary "digital natives". The contemporary research among university students confirms the notion that modern curricula should offer a vision of a school which is not a centre of obsolete knowledge distribution but a playground where the students learn the rules of the games that will be played in the 21 st century.

The article Didactic Connotations of Text-book Pictorial Adjuncts suggests a theoretical basis for development and assessment of didactic effect of pictorial adjuncts in foreign language textbooks. Barthes's (1977) theoretical interpretation of a press photograph message in three stages, a source of emission, a channel of transmission and a point of reception, is compared to textbook pictorial adjuncts that need to undergo didactic treatment in the first two stages; only then learning effect at the point of reception may be achieved. Comprehensive studies of pictorial adjuncts were written twenty or thirty years ago and the recent preference for photographs without didactic treatment in foreign language textbooks has been explained as attempts of publishers to blend text-book pictorials with visual environment of magazines. The article discusses the concept of "didactic code" at the source of emission and the possibilities of broader context of adjunct pictorials. A delicate balance between text and its pictorial adjunct must be achieved to avoid mere repetition or amplification of the set of connotations already given in the image. The presented theoretical basis is more relevant today than it might have been thirty years ago. It is general enough to be applicable in the prevailing visual digital environment and specific enough to be used for a detailed analysis of the learning effect based on the source of pictorial emission and its channel of transmission irrespective of the technology.