ABSTRACT
In using archives for educational purposes, there are two characteristics: their availability and their affordability (Inglese, Mayer, & Rigotti, 2007).
With new media technologies, archival materials produced in the past with analog technologies are very easily “transformed” into digital forms, increasing their availability as “multimedia content.” A joint collaboration between a university and an archive, such as ours, embodies an example worth sharing. The affordability concept supports the multimedia learning hypothesis (Mayer, 2001) that students learn more deeply when they interact with multimedia content, especially if they feel a personal relationship with the author to be studied, if this author is offered through a video interview format. We have chosen three main theories to give a theoretical framework to our case studies: the cognitive theory of multimedia learning developed by Mayer (2001, 2005), because learning is a cognitive activity, which gives us a solid but an incomplete picture. The multimodal learning theory (Jewitt, Kress, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001; Jewitt & Kress, 2003) together with Brandt’s intersubjectivity concept in literacy (1990) provide more elements in order to understand how reading and writing are strongly influenced by the situated social environment. We will briefly describe the three theories, followed by the narrative and the results of the case studies.
