Burn's teaching career started as a secondary school teacher, working for over twenty years in comprehensive schools 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, succeeding Clarissa Kaldor in representing the
King's Hedges ward. He contributed to the peace initiative to twin the city of Cambridge with
Szeged,
Hungary. 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 now Emeritus Professor of Media, based at the
UCL Knowledge Lab. He was the first professor of media at UCL, initiating an expansion of postgraduate programmes in media studies and UCL’s first undergraduate degree in media. 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 is also related to
film theory, but argues for integration of analysis across filming, editing, dramatic action, language, music and other modes. 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==