A view on the iconic turn from a semiotic perspective

Media are not only a means of communication. From a cognitive perspective, they may be viewed as components of an external, auxiliary memory system (Schönpflug 1997), and contemporary cognitive science “construes cognition as a complex system in which cognitive processes are ‘embodied, situated’ in environments, and ‘distributed’ across people and artifacts” (Nersessian 2007: 2). In man-machine communication, man-man-communication via digital machinery and especially in the World Wide Web (Heintz 2006, Steels 2006) the “external” components of this system have taken on more and more of the characteristics of our individual, “internal”, living and active memory with its richness of sensual and symbolic formats. The intellectual challenge in the drafts of the “masterminds” of hypertext (Eisenstein) and multimedia (Lintsbakh) was the detection of temporal/spatial, mathematical and linguistic correspondences between such different sensual and symbolic representations (Bulgakova 2007, Tsivian 2007). The so called “iconic” or “pictorial turn” was pulled along by the digital turn, and it may in turn have stimulated and accelerated the digital turn

Reflections on developing a tool for creating visual representations of learning designs: towards a visual language for learning designs

Over the past four years we have been developing CompendiumLD, a software tool for designing learning activities using a flexible visual interface. It has been developed as a tool to support lecturers, teachers and others involved in education to help them articulate their ideas and map out a design or learning sequence. CompendiumLD is a specialised version of Compendium, a tool for managing connections between information and ideas, which has been applied in many domains including the mapping of discussions and arguments. As most of the core knowledge mapping facilities provided by Compendium are included within CompendiumLD, it can be used for learning design, and applied it to other information mapping and modelling problems. Evidence gathered since CompendiumLD’s first release has shown the many conditions in which it is likely to be applied and appreciated by users, and that the need for visualising learning designs as a solution to understanding how all components of planned learning and teaching fit together may continue to grow. Furthermore, the use of technology is making the process of creating courses more complex. We explore these challenges and conclude with some reflections on the developments in visual representation needed to further facilitate the modelling of today and tomorrow’s complex learning situations

Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

Usability of Musical Digital Libraries: a Multimodal Analysis.

There has been substantial research on technical aspects of musical digital libraries, but comparatively little on usability aspects. We have evaluated four web-accessible music libraries, focusing particularly on features that are particular to music libraries, such as music retrieval mechanisms. Although the original focus of the work was on how modalities are combined within the interactions with such libraries, that was not where the main difficulties were found. Libraries were generally well designed for use of different modalities. The main challenges identified relate to the details of melody matching and to simplifying the choices of file format. These issues are discussed in detail. 1

Cross-Cultural Understanding of Interface Design: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Icon Recognition

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study that investigated cultural aspects of understanding the website of a virtual campus. Results indicate differences in expectations and understanding due to the users’ knowledge of everyday life and real world experience, and suggest that the campus metaphor that was used is not universally transferable