Andrew Burn

• University College London

Andrew Burn, Rebecca Bushnell, and Elizabeth B. Hunter discuss ways in which video games and virtual reality can transform canonical plays and Shakespeare in particular. Those transformations can offer insights into the underlying principles and embodied performance of familiar stories. Video games and virtual reality adaptations of canonical theat...

This sample chapter is from my book Literature, Videogames, and Learning. The book explores the relationships between literature and videogames, drawing on a variety of research projects over the last 10 years or so, many of them involving young people's game designs based on literary texts. The chapter presents case studies of a number of such pro...

I've chosen Chapter 7 as a sample because it gives something of an overview of projects run by myself and colleagues in young people's game designs based, in this case, on Beowulf. It draws heavily on my colleagues' published work, while also offering an in-depth analysis of one game made by a 10 year-old boy in the workshop we ran at the National...

The close reading of media texts has a long tradition in “subject English”, but in recent years some versions of the English curriculum have sought to exclude the study of such texts, dismissing them as irrelevant or inferior to those from the literary canon. This chapter proposes that the close relationship between English and Media needs to be re...

The question of aesthetic value remains a source of tension within diverse film education environments. While film-makers and audiences have visceral experiences of the value of cinema, these experiences are troubled by a contemporary film studies that tends to adopt a more relativist approach, suggesting that the experience of value is reflective...

This chapter argues that the aesthetic is inseparable from the semiotic, and that the question of aesthetics needs to be explored from certain principles of Social Semiotics, including in its relation to the domain of multimodality. Social Semiotics, with its resources of multimodality, offers a way to read across these phenomena of contemporary co...

Preparing younger generations to engage meaningfully with digital technology is often seen as one of the goals of 21st century education. JeanetteWing’s seminal work on Computational Thinking (CT) is an important landmark for this goal: CT represents a way of thinking, a set of problem-solving skills which can be valuable when interacting with digi...

This paper reflects on recent projects in a variety of media forms, in both formal and informal educational settings, discussing ways of expanding our notions of literacy practices which reflect their place in the wider lived experience of digital culture. We have collected these reflections under three headings. The first of these, Dynamic Literac...

This article describes the outcomes of a research project conducted at the Ministry of Stories (a London-based writing centre) which sought to develop an online, mentor-assisted, writing platform. Across a 3-month period, at four different sites across the UK, more than a hundred Year 7 pupils took part in the project, using the platform to write s...

Reports tell us that the internet is opening new dangers to children, including online grooming, exposure to pornography and financial scams (Carr 2004; Gardner 2003; UK Home Office 2001; O'Connell 2003). The result has been various initiatives which attempt to teach children safe surfing habits. The UK Home Office “ThinkUKnow” campaign featured ad...

Debates about media literacy raise many questions, in particular about the nature of critical reading of media texts, and about the nature and functions of the production of media texts by young people. A question which rarely rises to the surface, however, is the question of cultural value. The championship of popular culture in media education is...

In the project discussed in this article, 30 11-year olds made an animated film in the machinima style, influenced by both film and game culture, and using a 3-D animation software tool, Moviestorm. The processes and products of the project will be analysed using a social semiotic/multimodal approach, exploring the social interests behind the integ...

Integrating digital technologies into the curriculum has been a growing challenge, especially due to the failures of the majority of initiatives that were envisioned for this purpose. In an effort to comprehend and solve these issues, England has recently proposed a shift in the curricular approach, focusing in teaching technology's conceptual basi...

This chapter describes and analyses aspects of musical play at the two primary schools involved in the research. We are concerned not only with sound but also with other modes of communication, especially sight, gesture and touch, in musical play. There has long been recognition that music’s essentially sonic nature is closely allied to speech, ges...

In this concluding chapter we want to offer some further reflections on two aspects of the project: the central themes it addressed and the research methodologies. The first part, therefore, will return to questions and theories posed in the introductory chapter, and trace how these have been addressed through the book. The second section will expl...

This chapter focuses specifically on the form of computer games and its relation to the games of the playground. The Opies were unable to study this connection, of course, though a little more recent work has begun to touch on it. Curtis, for example, notes how the narratives and structures of specific computer games were beginning to appear in boy...

This chapter presents an analysis of selected recordings from the Opie Collection of Children's Games in the National Sound Archive. It contextualises them with an account of the Opies' research approach, and identifies three themes emerging from the recordings which are not found in published work by the Opies. These are: the strong rleatinoship b...

This chapter introduces an edited edition of essays which emerge from the project Children's Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age. It describes the project, and presents key findings and concepts. These consist of 'cultural rehearsal' (iterative performance of games and songs using new media); 'ludic bricolage' (children's adaptation and...

This article, building on an extensive summary of the European-scale Experts' Study on film literacy in Europe 2012, draws attention to two different conceptions of film education: as an (a) entitlement for all, a social good (akin to the entitlement to universal literacy) and as (b) an instrumental means of developing film consumers, or audiences....

This chapter describes a large research collaboration between HE and the British Library. It digitised the Opie Collection of children's games in the National Sound archive, and collected new games in a two-year ethnographic study of school playgrounds in London and Sheffield. This chapter analyses two sets of data collected in the playgrounds, usi...

El autor de este trabajo examina la atracción hacia el sentimiento de terror en los medios de comunicación, y especialmente en el cine, desde la perspectiva de la emoción contenida que genera el terror, lo angustioso y agradable… ¿Cuál es la naturaleza del miedo y el «placer» que se experimenta? ¿Por qué es importante que los educadores tengan en c...

This article describes a collaborative piece of theatre made by members of Headway, a charity working with head-injured people, and students and staff at Parkside Community College, an 11-16 school in Cambridge. The authors consider how the piece employs multimodal forms of expression and representational resources (including body, voice, and the t...

This article addresses practices of textual appropriation in computer games made by young people. By focusing on how young people's production work makes reference to popular media texts, it examines the basis on which such work claims to be legible as a game text: how it claims to be literate in the context of an after-school game-making club. The...

What might online communities and informal learning practices teach us about virtual world pedagogy? In this chapter we describe a research project in which learning practices in online worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second LifeTM (SL) were investigated. Working within an action research framework, we employed a range of methods to investigat...

This report surveys the core concept of creativity. It sets out an original way to disentangle the range and variety of theories and understandings of the concept. Most of us use the word ‘creativity’ or ‘creative’ casually with a range of different meanings. However, the key insight of this report is that it is helpful to understand the term in it...

Will man Medienpädagogik auch als Teil der Kulturwissenschaft im Sinne der Cultural Studies etablieren, dann gibt es im Sinne von David Buckingham zwei Ansatzpunkte. Zum einen sind es die kulturellen Erfahrungen von Kindern und Jugendlichen, die Teil der heutigen Kindheit sind und die sie auch definieren. Zu diesen kulturellen Erfahrungen gehören z...

This article is an interim report on a small action research project being carried out by a group of teachers into digital editing. The authors focus on a critical evaluation of a ‘conceptual framework’ for editing digitised moving images, devised as part of the research project. The body of the article is concerned with observations of students ca...

The aim of this chapter is to reflect about the teachers' training in media education. This training in England is quite insufficient and almost based on the transfer of reading competencies: this means that is does not prepare the teacher to work with digital media, normally characterized by authoring activities. Starting from the experience of a...

The aim of this chapter is to reflect about the teachers’ training in media education. This training in England is quite insufficient and almost based on the transfer of reading competencies: this means that is does not prepare the teacher to work with digital media, normally characterized by authoring activities. Starting from the experience of a...

This article presents a case study of the authoring of computer games by two secondary school pupils (a girl and a boy) in an English comprehensive school. The students' work is analysed as examples of multimodal literacy, in which both narrative and ludic aspects of their games are taken into account. The analysis is set in the context of recent d...

This article, which is speculative in outlook and emerges from an extended literature review on this subject, takes as its basic premise the notion that the idea of 'creativity'– whether in relation to literacy, schooling or the economy, is constructed as a series of rhetorical claims. These rhetorics of creativity emerge from the contexts of resea...

This resource helps secondary teachers develop media literacy across the curriculum and features a CD-ROM that contains examples of high-quality student work drawn from case studies.

The three authors have, between them, extensive experience of teaching English, Drama and Media, as well as teaching teachers in these fields. The article explores the implications of the apparently straightforward proposition that these three related domains, whose histories are so closely entangled, should enjoy parity. The proposition is explore...

It is often claimed that computers have the potential to engage and motivate children in ways that conventional classroom teaching does not. Children are assumed to have a natural aptitude and enthusiasm for computers; and the Internet is seen to make learning automatically more interesting and exciting. Over the last few years educational websites...

In this interview, Gunther Kress proposes how English needs to expand beyond its traditional linguistic frame into a semiotic frame which recognizes not only the visual but other modes. He argues also for a shift to forms of production in which the acts of reflection and meaning-making are fused, rather than separating the production of new meaning...

This is an opportunity to think hard about the rhetorics of multiliteracy and media literacy. What exactly do these mean when we look at the detail, at the 'micro-level' of literacy (Buckingham 2003)? How does a particular image or narrative moment 'translate' across different media? If we expect children to learn about the notion of 'character' in...

This article analyses the player–avatar relation in Final Fantasy 7, drawing on multimodality theory to analyse textual structures both in the game and in the discourse of player–interviews and fan writing. It argues that the avatar is a two-part structure, partly designed in conventional narrative terms as a protagonist of popular narrative, and p...

This authoritative landmark text examines the highly topical and important issue of ICT in literacy learning. Its distinctive focus on providing a systematic review of research in the field gives the reader an essential, comprehensive overview. As governments worldwide continue to invest heavily in ICT provisions in educational institutions, this b...

The emergence of game studies is provoking a struggle between adapted older disciplines in the effort to forge a new, discrete field of study. This paper reports on a two-year project titled Textuality in Video Games¹ and the range of research techniques that were employed in order to begin answering questions about role-play, pleasure, agency and...

About the book: This authoritative landmark text examines the highly topical and important issue of ICT in literacy learning. Its distinctive focus on providing a systematic review of research in the field gives the reader an essential, comprehensive overview. As governments worldwide continue to invest heavily in ICT provisions in educational inst...

This article argues for a raised awareness of the possibilities offered by the moving image in English, achieved through a wider and better informed understanding of the range of modes that are woven together in a typical text or performance. It pursues the argument through a case study of four films produced by bilingual Year 11 girls in a compreh...

In this article the participants report on a two year research project titled Textuality and Videogames; Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play that ran from September 2001, until late 2003 at the Institute of Education, University of London. After presenting an overview of the project, including the methodologies we have adopted, and the que...

This article will consider the making of animated film by Year 6 pupils (11 years old) based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, using digital drawing and animation software. It will examine how the act of inscription - making signs on a page or screen using software, pens or other materials - might be different in the context of digital compos...

This article presents an analysis of young people's readings of digital images from horror films. It reappraises theories of the cinematic image and the cinematic still; in particular, those of Eisenstein and Barthes. It suggests that the still image is employed mentally by the spectator as a means of anticipating the film, understanding and recall...

This article explores the impact on learning of digital technologies and media practices across the secondary curriculum, with a particular emphasis on non-linear video editing in a specialist media technology school. It observes the making of a trailer for Psycho by a group of Year 11 girls, asking how the advent of this very new technology enable...

This paper will report on the United Kingdom team's contribution to the Mediappro project. This European Union funded project aims to contribute to safer use of the internet and mobile technologies by identifying relevant pedagogical interventions to inform educational professionals and parents. Its overall aim is to develop young people's sense of...

This article takes a look at two kinds of new media used within English and sister subjects: digital video and computer games. It argues that the kinds of text made by young people with these media require us to attend more urgently to the range of signifying modes they combine, where language may or may not be the dominant mode. It also argues tha...

In this paper we examine the online multi-player RPG Anarchy Online, using social semiotics. Social semiotics emphasizes context, discourse and motivation in sign making and sign interpretation. Drawing on our own experiences of leveling up in Anarchy Online, player interviews, and recorded game sessions, we suggest three inter-related and broad ca...