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Multimedia educational applications convey meanings through several semiotic modes (e.g. text, image, sound, etc.). There is an urgent need for multimedia designers as well as for teachers to understand the meaning potential of these artifacts and discern the communicative purposes they serve. Towards this direction, a hermeneutic semiotic framework is proposed, which provides a controlled vocabulary for describing the logical meanings among the components that constitute multimedia representations. The framework in turn is implemented in the analysis of some multimedia materials in order to detect the types of their components and the logico-semantic relations identified among them. Using that framework, teachers would be equipped with visual literacy skills for reading the logical meanings of multimedia learning materials and multimedia designers would be able to design their own applications with respect to the logical meanings they want to promote through them.

This paper presents a genre-based conceptual framework for designing content for learning objects. Some content aggregation models are reviewed in order to stress the lack of such an approach. In this framework, learning objects are considered as multimodal macrogenres. These macrogenres are constituted of content objects which in fact are several types of digital microgenres. The information linking of content objects can be achieved through particular logicosemantic relations between them. Finally, if adopting this framework, an author/teacher is supported by a repertoire of concepts which make him capable of creating coherent material in order to affect and motivate his/her students in particular ways, through his/her intended social and educational purposes.