ABSTRACT
Students are increasingly being asked to create multimedia digital artefacts such as videos as assessment tasks. These objects are highly complex: they require relating images, text and spoken narration to support activities such as communicating scientific knowledge to non-specialist audiences. However, current understandings of the nature of these artefacts, how to teach them and how to assess them remain simplistic. Above all, they do not adequately grasp how such digital artefacts involve transformations of knowledge. This chapter uses the LCT concept of ‘semantic density’, which conceptualizes complexity, to analyse changes in the knowledge expressed through images, text and spoken narration in multimedia assignments from a fourth year pharmacology unit. Analysis reveals that key characteristics of perceived success in communicating science to non-specialist audiences involves ‘negotiation’, using linguistic and imagic resources as placeholders where the ‘everyday’ is used to ‘mediate’ the complex, and ‘building’, a process where complexity is developed across those resources. The chapter offers a significant step forward in our understanding of the assessment and pedagogy around the use of multimedia artefacts as university tasks.
