A Multimodal Framework for Computer Mediated Learning: The Reshaping of Curriculum Knowledge and Learning

Sign

The concept sign informs the analysis of technology-mediated learning presented in
this thesis. Building on the concept of sign in social semiotic, multimodal and activity
theory I view signs as motivated, transformative and mediating social interactions in
the material world that shape consciousness or ‘mind’.

Motivated Sign

Traditional Saussurean semiotics theorizes the relation of meaning (signified) and
form (signifier) as conventional and arbitrary (Saussure, 1974). From this perspective
there is no intrinsic connection between the meaning and the form used to express it:
people are regarded as confronted with ready-made systems for making meaning.
Theorizing a sign system∕mode as a code in which the rules fixed in advance
determine the process of sign making, rather than the selections or interests of people,
excludes the action of an individual agent. The agency of the sign maker is limited,
she or he can use the system but can not change it. The theorization of sign makers as
‘outside’ of the system of communication in traditional semiotic led to the distinction
between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ in which langue refers to the abstract potential of a
semiotic system and parole refers to the particular realizations of the potential of
langue. The ways in which people actually use language were rejected by traditional
semiotics as too individual an object of theory, and as a consequence the analytical
focus is primarily on language as a system and how the elements afforded in language
are structured.

Social semiotics does not make a distinction between langue and parole, a distinction
which it views as artificially separating the social from the individual and one that
‘cuts off semiosis from society, and semiotics from social and political thought’
(Hodge and Kress, 1988: 2). Social semiotics loosely re-frames langue as the
‘potential for use’, sets of semiotic alternatives that differentiate between elements so
as to reflect the social functions of a sign and parole as individual acts of sign

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