ABSTRACT
At the end of the introduction to Part II, I introduced the idea of ‘productive media’ construed entirely from the demands of the Conversational Framework. It makes repeated reference to action by the student, and articulation of their conceptions, hence the need for educational media that enable students to produce their own contributions via paper, disc, cassette or network. Paper has always been, and always will be an important productive medium for learners, still significant in schools, less so in universities, now that production of words is almost entirely electronic. The constructive areas of the curriculum, such as fine arts, media studies, design and technology, have a range of imaginative ways of enabling their students to produce work in a variety of media. The more theoretical areas have been confined to the written essay, report, or project. Electronic media have radically extended the range of expression for these areas with some rich and varied tools for building instantiations of ideas. HyperCard, mentioned in Chapter 6, p.109, is one example of a tool for building a network of ideas. The animation capabilities of PowerPoint could be a way of enabling a student to express their view of how a system works. But what are we actually using as the key enabler for student expression? Microsoft Word. Given what is possible in the electronic world, it might as well be a quill pen. In this chapter, we consider what might be, rather than what is, because there is very little in reality that exploits the productive capability of electronic media to allow the student to be the author. The impetus comes entirely from the predictive capacity of the Conversational Framework. It is, after all, one of the useful properties of a theoretical framework that it creates an expectation of what might be, rather than classifies what is.
