Much of the work of designing educational resources is ‘intuitive’ and many designers
find it difficult to articulate their decisions of when to use image, writing, animation and
so on and the principles that underlie these decisions. By focusing on the affordances
and constraints of the different modes that multimodal applications make available, the
thesis provides some principles for reflecting on design decisions. It addresses questions,
such as ‘when might image be more apt than writing?’, ‘what is it that movement can
realise on screen that a static visual representation can not?’, and so on. By exploring the
configuration of modes on screen the thesis gives designers resources for thinking about
what it means to represent an aspect of curriculum knowledge across a range of modes -
or in only one mode - or how links and structures relate curriculum elements to one
another.
By exploring the screen as compared with the page as a site of display the thesis ‘tracks’
the transformation of knowledge from page to screen and it reveals how much of that
which is ‘new’ is embedded in the cultural histories of the ‘old’ print based media. This
serves to highlight how principles of design move across technologies and media and
provides a potential for reflection and re-thinking the configuration of the ‘new’. The
‘old’ technologies are also informed by the potentials and configurations of the ‘new’ and
the design of the screen ‘spills’ onto the design of the page. In other words the thesis
provides principles and tools that are relevant to designers of printed educational
resources, especially in an environment where there is increasing convergence between
screen and page based educational resources.
The thesis has the potential to provide useful tools for teacher education and pedagogic
practices, in particular in relation to the use new technologies in the classroom. The
language of description provided here offers resources with which to discuss and focus
attention on how the different modes can be drawn upon in the classroom. It provides
principles that can be adapted to evaluate the usefulness of new technology applications.
For instance, the thesis offers educational practitioners resources for thinking about how
applications reshape curriculum knowledge, in particular the ways in which the resources
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