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

transformative highlights the continuous social ‘work’ involved in producing and
maintaining the conventions of meaning. In other words the grammars and
conventions of modal resources are upheld by people’s constant making of signs, not
by the arbitrary relationship of form and meaning.

The motivated transformative sign highlights the importance of the kinds of semiotic
resources that are available to the sign maker to choose from. The semiotic resources
that are available for sign making are intimately connected with the social location of
the sign maker, as well as her of his social context. In the process of sign making the
semiotic potentials of a mode are constantly changed both at the level of ‘grammar’
and the elements for meaning making. New resources come into the potentials for
meaning making and new arrangements of these elements are introduced. This is
important within multimodal theory as it opens up new possibilities for semiotic
resources to come into the stock of meaning making potentials. The concept of sign
and sign making that I use in this thesis is therefore more fluid than in the work of
Halliday and other systemic functional linguists.

External Signs, Mind and Learning

As already discussed, modes make available different representational and
Communicational affordances and as a consequence modes mediate learning in
different ways. This is significant for learning because the semiotic resources in the
social worlds that people live in are fundamentally connected to the development of
mind and ways of thinking. The notion of sign making presented in the previous
section of the chapter, which focuses primarily on ‘external material signs’, can be
integrated with a sociocultural notion of internal sign making. Sociocultural theory
assumes that any function in a person’s cultural development appears first between
people in their social interactions (the social plane), and second ‘within’ the person
(the internal plane) (Vygotsky, 1981). This process is termed internalisation and can
be described as a process of the internal taking in and reworking of the social plane.
As I discussed earlier in relation to external signs, internalisation is mediated by

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