Burn's teaching career started as a secondary school teacher, working for over twenty years in Huntingdon, St. Neots and Cambridge. He served as a member of the Labour Party's ruling administration of Cambridge City council between 1982 and 1987, representing the King's Hedges ward. He contributed to the peace initiative to twin the city of Cambridge with Szeged, Hungary. During the specialization of United Kingdomsecondary schools in the late 1990s, Burn played a key role in ensuring his school, Parkside Community College, became the UK's first specialist media arts college. The work lasted roughly a decade, with the college focusing on film, animation and video games. It is described in the book Burn co-authored with James Durran regarding media literacy in schools, which was published in 2007 by Sage. The book represents key aspects of Burn’s theory and research, in particular how media education can foster cultural, critical and creative work by young people, especially in their production of their own films, animations and videogames, cultural forms which occupy a large part of Burn’s research work. After working in secondary education, Burn moved into Higher Education, after studying for a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Studies and a PhD in film semiotics at the UCL Institute of Education. His doctoral supervisor was Gunther Kress. He was appointed lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the IOE in 2001, becoming a Reader in 2007, and Professor in 2009. He is Professor of English, Media and Drama, based at the UCL Knowledge Lab. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Vienna and the University of Agder. In 2003, Burn was the first person to establish and coin the term, Kineikonic Mode. The work was based in multimodality theory, studying the overall function of various modes in film, animation and video game. The Kineikonic Mode also had connections with film theory. It has since been expanded to analyse time and space in young people’s media productions, and how these express aspects of identity. Burn is also director of MAGiCAL Projects, an enterprise for developing and marketing game-based tools for education and leisure. Missionmaker is one example, enabling games to be created by young people to learn about game culture and design.
Media Arts and Play Research
In 2012, Burn became a founding member and co-director of a collaborative research initiative between the UCL Institute of Education and the British Film Institute. The was created as a research partnership focused on digital media, the media arts, and arts education. It aims to promote conversations between researchers, educators, cultural institutions and media arts practitioners. Projects conducted by DARE include a European study of film education with the British Film Institute; Playing Shakespeare, which developed a videogame-authoring tool for Macbeth with Shakespeare’s Globe; and Playing Beowulf, which developed a similar tool for the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf with the British Library. Burn has also led a major project with the British Library, the University of Sheffield, and the University of East London, to create a digital archive of research on playground games and their relation to children’s media cultures. This archive, at the British Library, includes the sound collection of Iona and Peter Opie, making it a repository of international importance. Burn was awarded the 2016 Opie Prize of the American Folklore Society for the book of the project, with colleagues in the research team.
Kineikonic Mode
The Kineikonic Mode was developed from the idea of multimodality, a theory of the way in which different forms of communication work together. The rise in technology during the 20th century meant that many historic modes were revisited in the context of digital cultures and production practices. The study of the moving image, an important cultural form in modern society, is addressed by the Kineikonic Mode. Burn established the theory of the Kineikonic Mode in 2003 with David Parker. It was proposed as a general theory of film semiotics, but has often been used to explore the way that informal digital video production can construct, represent or dramatize the identities of young filmmakers. The term adapts two Greek words which signify "moving image". It provides a way to study how modes such as speech, music, dramatic action are orchestrated by the grammars of filming and editing to create meaning for makers and viewers. The theory can be applied to a number of cultural forms, including film, video, video game and animation. The concept of "mode" is derived from multimodal theory. By studying each mode individually and together, analysts can understand how the meaning of a text is constructed.
