1 Images and visuality in ICT educational design Mie Buhl Abstract The concept of educational design emphasises the educational dimension in the development of ICT-based learning tools and environments, and in the form of models for the use of existing applications in learning cultures. The intrinsic breadth of various types of images creates new possibilities and challenges for the educational designer of learning processes. Digital media have moved the boundaries between images and other kinds of modalities (e.g. writing, speech and sound) and have augmented the possibilities for integrating images and visuality in new forms of knowledge-building and in new learning cultures. The paper presents a technological and domain-oriented approach to understanding the learning potential and functions of images and visuality. The paper argues that the potential of the domain of images – both in terms of design and knowledge – is only made into an active part of educational design if the producer is skilled and knowledgeable about this. 1 Introduction A learning tool’s design shapes conceptions about teaching and learning and thus becomes visible in the design for learning’s choice of text, task and image. Text has a privileged place as the bearer of meaning in most learning tools (blackboards, overheads, books, articles, reports, etc). With ICT-based learning tools, the design’s images, graphics and sound, however, have acquired increasing significance by virtue of the possible synergies between new forms of knowledge-building and learning cultures which require new aesthetic and educational competences of the producer. Even though it is possible to base learning tools solely on text, digital media have the possibility of activating multimodal processes. As a starting point, images are familiar and easy to understand as either photos, drawings, paintings, analogic graphics or digital graphics. This familiar understanding we know and understand when images are something that hangs on walls, appears in magazines, books, periodicals, on TV or on the computer screen as either art, illustrations, advertisements, documentations of everyday life or public events. This familiar understanding of images is easy to transfer to the computer. Photos, drawings, paintings and graphic print each have their own characteristic features. When they are digitalised, possibilities that have heretofore existed in analogue form are expanded and innovated. Photos are taken with digital cameras, while drawings, graphic print and paintings are executed with the help of software programs. Digital images are at once the traditions that follow analogue logic and the new that follow digital logic. The computer plays a central role in preserving, processing and presenting images. Digitalisation makes it possible for work to be done on physically existing images as well as on digitally produced images that can be infinitely refined in ever new versions and have infinite possibilities for the construction of meaning. Consequently, in the production of digital learning tools in which images are a part, there are a number of educational considerations on which educational design must take a position. Images and visuality can hardly be fully comprehended outside the totality of all modalities, i.e. visuality, sound, movement and medialities, i.e. images, sound, graphics and dramaturgy. Nevertheless, it makes analytical sense to focus on images and visuality separately and on the disciplines connected thereto in order to discuss their multimodal qualities and learning potential.