labour that shapes the ways that subjects (students) act on the object. A teacher and
student have specific roles in the classroom. The introduction of a new tool into the
classroom can re-mediate these roles and the division of labour between subjects.
Activity systems include explicit and tacit rules, norms, values, and routines. These
shape the interactions of subject and tools with the object. Students’ interaction with
the Steinbeck CD-ROM (discussed in Chapter Four), for example, is informed by the
explicit rules included rules of behaviour displayed in the school, the timetable and
lesson length, and the values of the English national curriculum as mediated by the
teacher, and the teacher’s expectation of them.
I use activity system to highlight the elements beyond the immediate observable
interaction to be considered in the analysis of the data. Such as the interplay between
the computer, the computer application and the different semiotic resources that these
make available, the students’ purposes, the teacher’s purposes in the lesson, the
curriculum, and the traditions and histories of school subjects.
Signs and Transformation
For Halliday (1978, 1985) the system of meaning potentials and the grammar of a
mode permits an infinite combination of elements within it: the resources of the
system, the signifying stuff, remain constant and people’s use of these resources, their
choice and combination of elements in contexts of use bring about new signifieds,
new signs. Following Kress (1997) I see each use of a signifier as realising a new
sign and this new sign as changing the potential of the signifier to mean. Slowly over
time the signifier changes. Signifiers are constantly worked and remade in the process
of making meaning. The motivated sign means that people bring together and connect
the available form that is most apt to express the meaning they want to express at a
given moment. In this the signifier that they use takes on a new meaning (in the sign)
it is transformed by its use. In other words signs are always newly made, always
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