Digital Screen Mediation in Education

Authentic and Agentive Technology Practices for Teaching and Learning

Carla Meskill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367434168
• eBook ISBN: 9781000341898
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Digital Screen Mediation in Education explores the complex role of visual mediation in today's digitally enhanced classrooms. While the notion that technology tools have agency—that they act to induce learning—pervades contemporary conversations about pedagogy, this unique volume reframes instructional agency around teachers. The book's theoretically reinforced and multidisciplinary approach to enhancing effective instruction with screen-based technologies spans aesthetics, technical knowledge, teacher empowerment, social media, and beyond. Researchers in educational technology, instructional design, online learning, and digital pedagogies as well as prospective and practicing educators will find a rigorous treatment of how skilled, thoughtful teaching with, through, and around digital screens can bring about successful learning outcomes.

Part I

Foundations

1
Image-Making: A Compact History

As discussed in the Introduction, visual images—depictions via visual artifice—play a central role in how we make sense of and communicate about the world. For millennia we have taken what we see and rendered this into one visual form or another. This chapter surveys the sociocultural history of image-making from Plato to drone selfies. The aim is to briefly and succinctly lay out how visual representation has been constructed, considered, and made use of as part of human development.

For every age there is an affinity for forms.

Rudolph Arnheim

…thinking about, through and with images across ages can broaden our understanding of how images produce, convey, and frame diverse kinds of knowledge in different ways.

Vaage et al., 2016

The ways that we think and talk about the world have long been influenced by images. Likewise, images get shaped by how we think and talk about the world. It is difficult to imagine a world empty of them: a world with no physical images nor the tools with which to make, manipulate, and display them. It is also difficult to imagine what an ancient scholar might make of what appears on our many digital screens today, let alone the fact that this vast and complex information travels seamlessly and invisibly through the air. That pre-digital scholar might interpret screen images as bizarre spectacle that excludes participation—until someone points out the Ratings and Comments sections, of course. Imagine also the dawn of television when moving pictures were first beamed into living rooms. The infamous media—and pre-digital—theorist Marshall McLuhan called this phenomenon “extensions of the sensorium.” According to McLuhan, these beamed-in images were not strictly visual, but multimodal with emphasis on the sense of the embodied and the communal (McLuhan, 1962). This was a prescient observation given the direction digital practices have taken and how highly social our multimodal experiences have become.

What Is an Image?

An image is a phenomenon in space made to be seen by others. It is a form of language-independent communication. To re-present something real or imaginary is to render it in two, three or four dimensions by employing still and moving images, animation, painting, sculpture, and the like. Images appeal to us as they aid comprehension and provoke contemplation and conversations. They can also put us in a deep state of attentiveness or flow (Csikszentmihalyi et al., 2014).

As McLuhan again rightly observed, both the act of image-making and the act of viewing are social in nature with myriad contextual factors at play. And, as art critic Raymond Williams famously put it, representation is a social practice, not an isolated collection of essences arbitrarily assembled in paint, stone, metal, or by digital techniques. Images cannot exist in isolation. They require beholders who draw out contingent feelings, interpretations, and contexts. Indeed, when taken to a new context, an image’s meanings can be reinterpreted according to that new context. In short, images have complex and active lives beyond their rendering. Social, cultural, historical, and economic factors contribute to their creation, their interpretations, and their uses (Williams, 2020).

According to visual theorist Elkins, there are two general types of image. There are pictorial images which are natural and mimetic. They represent or record what we see in the world; for example, naturalistic drawings and photographs. Secondly, there are images that represent concepts. The two—pictorial and conceptual—often overlap, especially in works of art and in Infovis—digital visualization of data/information (Elkins, 2003). In keeping with McLuhan’s pre-digital insights, we will consider pictorial and conceptual images as both multimodal—embodied—and communal—social. This is in preparation for exploring how the embodied and social aspects of images come into play in education.

First, let’s consider an image. Below are four representations of an egg.

Egg 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8_YkK6cAUY

Figure 1.1Egg 1

Figure 1.2Egg 2

Figure 1.3Egg 3

Look at each and ask

Is the image pictorial or conceptual or some combination of both?

What relevant information comes to mind?

How do different sources of context inform what comes to mind? For example, the context of the representation, the context in which it is viewed, the context in which you believe it to have been made, etc.

What does the image evoke for you personally given the immediate context? Context here is shorthand for all of the rich, dense s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Foundations
• Part II: Practice
• Index