Abstract

Designing Children’s Multimedia 47
Terms and Definitions:
Building Bridges on Shifting Ground
There is a huge discomfort with the current terminology used to talk and write about
the nature of communicational practices in the digital age. An agreed vocabulary has
yet to emerge. A wobbly bridge connects communication of similar ideas between
disciplines. As if there is no concrete foundation supporting the structure of this
conversation, each discipline has built its own bricks, inventing terminologies to
offer a means of understanding. These have been insightful, formative but, at times,
fractured, fragmented, and overlapping. Kuutti (1999) remarks on the situation in
the information systems field: “Currently, each researcher tends to use his or her
own framework and concepts, which rarely are integrated or even comparable to
any marked extent” (Kuutti, 1999, p. 372). Technologies, forms, and mediums of
communication are in flux; naturally, ideas about these new forms are in flux, too.
Certainly in the context of a discussion about children, educational ideals about
the best way forward in rebuilding (“reform”ing) a curriculum around constantly
shifting ground acquiesce to this state of flux. A malleable frame of reference is a
natural fit to such an interdisciplinary, flexible, and potentially rich site of creative,
communicative development. Knowing one’s point of viewing and purpose then
provides the kind of exacting measures necessary to progress knowledge about the
way communicational practices are transforming and being transformed by new
technological tools available in our society. My approach in this chapter is one of
practical experience in multimedia design, and evidence from educational studies and
studies in human-computer interaction theoretically underpinned by developmental
psychology, semiotics, and socioculturalism. The intention of this chapter is not to
develop a terminology suitable to sustain the current discourse, but to tease out the
meanings of relevant existing terms.
Multimodal texts communicate through the interplay of images and words. The
Katie Morag stories that provided grounding for the children’s unit of work are a
good example of this definition of multimedia. The opening page of all the Katie
Morag picture books is a detailed map of the island with labels of each and every
important place, like Granny Island’s house and the Post Office. The picture books
are beautifully illustrated with watercolor landscapes that speak anew to the story
each time they are looked at closely. Multimedia is a term used since the 1950s in
manifestly varying ways. It refers to ”the use of two or more media to present information”
(Green & Brown, 2002, p. 4). Adopted herein is the more specific term
digital multimedia to “refer to any combination of media that can be interpreted,
stored and displayed by a computer” (Green & Brown, 2002, p. 4). The wide range
of modes of communication simultaneously at work when children interact with
multimedia brings to bear, in this chapter, a discussion of visual literacy, digital literacy,
and challenges to traditional notions of literacy. Communicative practice is a
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