mediated learning. In particular, I have shown the usefulness of activity theory in
examining the social forces that underpin the activity of students and providing a
theoretical account of the move from everyday to scientific concepts in school learning
and the modal shaping of curriculum knowledge. Although my attempt to bring these two
theories together in this thesis is at an early stage, it serves to mark my desire to
contribute to both theoretical approaches in the future. This thesis is then the beginning,
particularly to re-think the concepts of ‘mediational means’, ‘semiotic mediation’ and
‘internalisation’ as multimodal concepts, and to provide a stronger theorisation of the
social forces that influence the motivated production of multimodal signs.
Social semiotics focuses on a concern and interest with semiosis that is how people make
meaning; and although this theory has much to offer educational research, its theoretical
focus is not that of learning and curriculum. Within social semiotics while all meaning
making is clearly understood as social, and all sign makers are clearly socially positioned
and shaped, the social is not theorised beyond the notion of the individual sign maker’s
‘interest’ (Kress, 1993). The ways in which social forces, such as curriculum, school
policy, the history a school subject impact on sign making is not adequately theorised
within social semiotics for the purpose of the thesis. In order to locate the thesis within
the social institution of the school more clearly I turned to activity theory.
Activity theory was used in the thesis as a tool to think with, a heuristic, a framework
within which to attend to the social forces that underpin and produce the students’ sign
making and learning in the three examples of technology-mediated learning discussed in
the thesis. Activity theory was used in this way to bring a range of factors into the realm
of the analysis: the history of curriculum entities, the curriculum itself, the (re)mediation
of the roles of student and teacher in the classroom, and so on. Within the thesis the
theory of social semiotics is embedded in the framework of activity theory, with the
former as the ‘focus’, and the later as ‘the field’, enabling the students’ sign making to be
explored within the specific social context of the classroom.
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