The shift to new paradigms in education pushed by new media has initiated a critical rethinking in the conversation about and practice of teaching and learning. This paper proposes a new description of curriculum design based on a traditional conceptual knowledge framework. The goal is to make a theoretical contribution for interpreting the development of educational technologies and integrating them into Western teaching and practice. Discussion includes knowledge as a relationship; basic properties of knowledge; and learning as the activity of establishing a knowledge relationship and new media as powerful tools. An undergraduate course is described, "The Institutional and the Society," in which digital media support was to provide "live" portraits describing the goals and activities of different institutions (for example, Amnesty International), to be matched with the theoretical approach offered during lectures. Discussion then moves to user-centered design in adaptive hypermedia systems; learning as being in dialog; and the role of teaching. (Contains 24 references.) (AEF)