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HCI and Industrial Design are both disciplines that are currently experiencing radical transformation in terms of their identity and scope. HCI has moved beyond its origins in human factors and cognitive psychology towards the proactive and generative design of experience. Industrial Design has similarly evolved from a concern with physical form and function-giving solutions to the holistic design considerations of the user's experience. Given the complexity and scale of this shifting design landscape, the response of design education must shift in methods and learning and teaching objectives. This paper provides the Design and Technology Education community with a research case study of innovation within HCI education, here situated within the broader context of Industrial Design education. We present a novel pedagogy for designing digital touch communications, developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration of HCI, Industrial Design, and Social Science academics, and advanced through a coursework assignment for 64 undergraduate Industrial Design and Technology students undertaking a User-Experience Design module at the School of Design and Creative Arts, Loughborough University (UK). We discuss the role of low-fidelity experience prototyping of digital touch interactions beyond screens, and the limitations of such an approach when engaged with by novice designers with entrenched material science understanding. We conclude the paper with a call for new educational 'tools' to support and scaffold both the learning and teaching of design for digital touch experiences within a User-Experience Design context, and we offer our development of a Designing Digital Touch Toolkit as one such tool.

This article explores how to research the opportunities for emotional engagement that mobile technologies provide for the design and enactment of learning environments. In the context of mobile technologies that foster location-based linking, we make the case for the centrality of in situ real-time observational research on how emotional engagement unfolds and for the inclusion of bodily aspects of interaction. We propose that multimodal methods offer tools for observing emotion as a central facet of person-environment interaction and provide an example of these methods put into practice for a study of emotional engagement in mobile history learning. A multimodal analysis of video data from 16 pairs of 9- to 10-year-olds learning about the World War II history of their local Common is used to illustrate how students' emotional engagement was supported by their use of mobile devices through multimodal layering and linking of stimuli, the creation of digital artifacts, and changes in pace. These findings are significant for understanding the role of digital augmentation in fostering emotional engagement in history learning, informing how digital augmentation can be designed to effectively foster emotional engagement for learning, and providing insight into the benefits of multimodality as an analytical approach for examining emotion through bodily interaction.

This paper takes a multimodal approach to analysing embodied interaction and discourses of scientific investigation using an interactive tangible tabletop. It argues that embodied forms of interaction are central to science inquiry. More specifically, the paper examines the role of hand actions in the development of descriptions and explanations of scientific phenomena in tangible digital learning environments. It reports an observational study of primary school students aged 10-11 years conducting scientific investigations via an interactive tangible tabletop. Through the systematic tracking and analysis of hand action in line with phases of scientific inquiry the paper maps, critiques and extends previous research, notably Roth's concept of a "developmental trajectory", to develop a "taxonomy" of hand actions for scientific inquiry in tangible digital learning environments. The paper concludes by presenting an alternative model through which to understand the semiotic role of the hands in scientific inquiry, one in which different hand actions do not follow a simple developmental sequence, but instead fulfil different functions across the inquiry process.

What exactly has changed in the production of secondary school English over the last decade? To provide one part of an answer to that question, this paper takes the practice of annotation--a defining activity of the subject English in the UK seldom researched--and uses it as a device for uncovering aspects of changes in the subject. The theoretical approach is that of multimodal social semiotics with an historical perspective. A multimodal approach looks beyond language to all forms of communication. The approach used in this paper allows investigation of the interactions among changes in the social environment, policy, curriculum, technology, and student resources. The authors draw on illustrative examples from three research projects around subject English. Their analysis shows that by 2009, the policy, technological, and communicational landscape of school English had changed dramatically. Now the majority of English lessons are taught on an Internet-enabled interactive whiteboard (IWB) supported by scanners, visualizers, and wireless peripherals such as slates. (Contains 3 figures.)

Teachers making texts for use in the classroom is nothing new, it is an established aspect of pedagogic practice. The introduction of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) into UK secondary schools has, however, impacted on this practice in a number of ways. Changes in the site of design and display--from the printed page or worksheet and the blackboard to the electronic site of the screen, together with easy access to multimodal resources, including colour, image, sound and movement--bring new potentials for teacher text design for IWBs. The texts designed and used with IWBs can be viewed as a meeting point for the agenda of educational policy, the interests of the commercial sector, teachers' pedagogic concerns and the facilities of technology. Pace, interactivity and multimodality are converged on by policy and research literature as key benefits of IWBs for pedagogy. In this article, we discuss teachers' design of IWB texts with a focus on these three resources. Drawing on three illustrative examples of IWB use in secondary schools maths, we examine how these resources are articulated and mediated in the classroom through teachers' text design. We highlight the role of teachers in digital text design and the potential of text design as a pedagogic tool for change (and non-change). We conclude that pedagogic text design for IWBs would benefit from a more nuanced approach to these (and other) resources that foregrounds pedagogy and backgrounds technology. (Contains 3 figures.)

This article makes a methodological contribution to investigating the policy-practice nexus in the English classroom. It looks beyond language to offer a multimodal case study analysis of English classrooms in three cities: Delhi, Johannesburg, and London. The article shows how policies mediated by the agencies of the state, the school, the English department, and individual teachers are inflected and refracted through the textual cycle to position teachers and students in particular ways. The case studies show local, specific inflections of what teachers are able to do within the constraints of the policy-practice nexus and provide insights into how "subject English" is realised across three countries, each of which has a distinct social, historical, and cultural relation to English. This study has implications for developing teachers' critical understandings of their central role in translating subject English through the textual cycle. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

Textuality is often thought of in linguistic terms; for instance, the talk and writing that circulate in the classroom. In this paper I take a multimodal perspective on textuality and context. I draw on illustrative examples from school Science and English to examine how image, colour, gesture, gaze, posture and movement--as well as writing and speech--are mobilized and orchestrated by teachers and students, and how this shapes learning contexts. Throughout the paper I discuss the issues raised by a multimodal perspective for the conceptualization of text and learning context, and how this approach can contribute to learning and pedagogy more generally. I suggest that attending to the full ensemble of communicative modes involved in learning contexts enables a richer view of the complex ways in which curriculum knowledge (and policy) is mediated and articulated through classroom practices. (Contains 3 figures.)

As words fly onto the computer screen, revolve, and dissolve, image, sound, and movement enter school classrooms in "new" and significant ways, ways that reconfigure the relationship of image and word. In this paper I discuss these "new" modal configurations and explore how they impact on students' text production and reading in English schools. I look at the changing role of writing on screen, in particular how the visual character of writing and the increasingly dominant role of image unsettle and decentre the predominance of word. Through illustrative examples of ICT applications and students' interaction with these in school English and science (and games in a home context), I explore how they seem to promote image over writing. More generally, I discuss what all of this means for literacy and how readers of school age interpret multimodal texts. (Contains 1 note and 6 figures.)

Teachers making texts for use in the classroom is nothing new, it is an established aspect of pedagogic practice. The introduction of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) into UK secondary schools has, however, impacted on this practice in a number of ways. Changes in the site of design and display - from the printed page or worksheet and the blackboard to the electronic site of the screen, together with easy access to multimodal resources, including colour, image, sound and movement - bring new potentials for teacher text design for IWBs. The texts designed and used with IWBs can be viewed as a meeting point for the agenda of educational policy, the interests of the commercial sector, teachers' pedagogic concerns and the facilities of technology. Pace, interactivity and multimodality are converged on by policy and research literature as key benefits of IWBs for pedagogy. In this article, we discuss teachers' design of IWB texts with a focus on these three resources. Drawing on three illustrative examples of IWB use in secondary schools maths, we examine how these resources are articulated and mediated in the classroom through teachers' text design. We highlight the role of teachers in digital text design and the potential of text design as a pedagogic tool for change (and non-change). We conclude that pedagogic text design for IWBs would benefit from a more nuanced approach to these (and other) resources that foregrounds pedagogy and backgrounds technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a methodological contribution to investigating the policy-practice nexus in the English classroom. It looks beyond language to offer a multimodal case study analysis of English classrooms in three cities: Delhi, Johannesburg, and London. The article shows how polities mediated by the agencies of the state, the school, the English department, and individual teachers are inflected and refracted through the textual cycle to position teachers and students in particular ways. The case studies show local, specific inflections of what teachers are able to do within the constraints of the policy-practice nexus and provide insights into how subject English is realised across three countries, each of which has a distinct social, historical, and cultural relation to English. This study has implications for developing teachers' critical understandings of their central role in translating subject English through the textual cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]