Staffan Selander

Against the background of a longstanding collaboration between Gunther Kress’s research group in London and my own research group in Stockholm, I reflect, in this paper, on the role of Kress’s ideas in our joint development of a social semiotic, multimodal, and design-oriented approach to learning, an approach which sees learning as performative, and as an activity in which learners create their own learning paths. I first discuss how, for Kress, this path has three elements, the affordances of the learning resources available to the learner, the learner’s ‘interest’ which turns aspects of these resources into ‘prompts’ for learning, and the learner’s active interpretation and transformation of these aspects, the results of which can then be recognized and valued as ‘signs of learning’. However, recognizing learning also needs to take account of the dimension of time, so as to make it possible to assess whether learners have gained knowledges and skills they did not have at an earlier stage. I then discuss the role of context in Kress’s thinking about learning. For Kress, context is another vital aspect of a social semiotic theory of learning. On the one hand, Kress focuses here on the specific, unique contexts in which individual learners create their own learning paths. On the other hand, he recognizes that signs will always carry social and political relations. Reflecting on the dynamic relation between individual learners and the way institutions regulate ways of learning, I discuss both the continued role of institutional learning contexts and their hidden curricula, and the way emerging technologies facilitate individual learning paths and interactive, participatory forms of learning.

As been highlighted by many, for instance by PISA, Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is a critical and necessary 21st century skill across educational settings. While many initiatives have been launched to investigate the nature of these skills, fewer are the attempts to understand how they should be assessed. However, in 2015, the PISA organization presented a framework for assessing CPS skills. This paper reports on a study investigating the predictive validity of the PISA assessment framework and if and how modes of communication influence the assessment of 24 students’ collaborative problem solving activities when using a computer-based assessment task system. The findings presented demonstrate that the PISA CPS assessment framework have a weak predictive validity, does not count for quality or productivity in communication, and that the mode of communication indeed influence CPS processes and in turn what is possible to assess.

The re-conceptualisation of texts over the last 20 years, as well as the development of a multimodal understanding of communication and representation of knowledge, has profound consequences for the reading and understanding of multimodal texts, not least in educational contexts. However, if teachers and students are given tools to "unwrap" multimodal texts, they can develop a deeper understanding of texts, information structures, and the textual organisation of knowledge. This article presents a model for working with multimodal texts in education with the intention to highlight mutual multimodal text analysis in relation to the subject content. Examples are taken from a Singaporean science textbook as well as a Chilean science textbook, in order to demonstrate that the framework is versatile and applicable across different cultural contexts. The model takes into account the following aspects of texts: the general structure, how different semiotic resources operate, the ways in which different resources are combined (including coherence), the use of figurative language, and explicit/implicit values. Since learning operates on different dimensions-such as social and affective dimensions besides the cognitive onesour inclusion of figurative language and values as components for textual analysis is a contribution to multimodal text analysis for learning.

Designs for Learning, established in 2008, is now taking a step forward. During 2015 we have worked with a new publishing format and a new editorial structure, and from 2016 we will be an online, Open Access journal published by Stockholm University Press in (technical) collaboration with Ubiquity Press. The Editorial Board has been extended to a deeper collaboration and a joint editorial structure between Stockholm University, University of Bergen and Aalborg University. These changes enable new possibilities not only for readers, but also for authors and reviewers. Let us explain why. Designs for Learning will take advantage of the new online format to engage authors, reviewers, and readers in discussions by opening for commenting on articles. Thus, we aim to have Designs for Learning develop into a forum for hot-spot discussions. All articles (also earlier ones) will be available for indexing in different databases, and we will work hard to meet the requirements for these databases. The new online interface also makes it possible for us to make the content available in more formats. All new articles will be available in both XML and PDF formats. The XML format opens up for reading on mobile platforms, as well as enabling further search engine optimisation. In order for authors and readers to understand more about how our publications are used by others, the website will show up-to-date usage statistics per article. It will also be possible to see if content has been mentioned in other digital media or if it as been cited in other academic publications. Our new website can host any digital format such as video, audio clips, software, or data sets. From now on authors, to a greater extent, are able to link to and embed these new media in their written texts. The Open Access licencing of material will further encourage the sharing of these new or enhanced ideas beyond the traditional distribution channels. In addition to these new technical enhancements, the new Editorial management will focus on excellence in the evaluation process, and will therefore

This is indeed an out of the ordinary issue. First and foremost it is the first double-issue, where we present a number of full papers based on some of the material presented at the 2nd international bi-annual conference on “Design for Learning – a new conceptualization of learning”, held in Stockholm in 2010. Our aim was perhaps a bit more modest than what the by-line articulated – still we wanted to put forward a design-theoretic and multimodal perspective on learning, based on the understanding of communication, meaning-making and transformative sign-making. The included papers from the conference, reflects these issues and have been revised, submitted, editorial, and double blind reviewed to ensure the standards of this journal. Secondly, this issue marks the beginning of the new partnership formed between the original Stockholm-based group DidaktikDesign at Stockholm University, and the Copenhagen-based group from the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University. The partnership extends merely editing of the journal at hand; we also contemplate to cooperate on coming conferences and publications.

We hereby welcome you to the second year of our journal. Evidently we are filling a gap in the discussions on “designs for learning” and “didactic designs”, concepts that will be discussed further during our next Designs-for-learning conference on March 17–19, 2010.

It is a great pleasure for me to introduce this second issue of the new journal Designs for Learning. I would like to welcome our new reviewers andmembers of the advisory board, and I also would like to express my thanks to all of you who have sent in articles for publication. The editorial board has from the beginning on established the routines for sending articles to two independent reviewers and made plans for the years to come. Among these is the planning for the next conference. The theme of the first conference inMarch 2008 was “defining the field”. The theme for the next conference inMarch 2010 might be “towards a new conceptualization of learning” in terms of media, arenas, artefacts and spaces used for learning.