modes interact in a learning situation. The need to look beyond language to how
modes interact is highlighted by the silent activity that accompanies much
technology-mediated learning. To continue to connect learning with talk at the
exclusion of all other modes is, as I demonstrate in this thesis, a restrictive concept of
learning.
The facilities of the medium of computers impact on learning. The semiotic resources
of interactivity and the linking web structures of computer applications, for instance,
provide the potential for new practices of reading, producing and disseminating texts.
The range of modes made easily available via computer applications and the
configuration of these resources on screen offer students a wider range of semiotic
resources for learning than do some other medium.
Texts and Practices as One Evidence of Learning
Sociocultural and multimodal theories of the fundamental connection between
external signs and cognitive development and learning enables students texts
(complex signs) to be analyzed as one kind of evidence of their learning and the
cognitive processes they engaged in. The patterned exchanges and interactions that
enact texts are always immanent in them, they are always materially embodied in and
through them. In short texts occur in “...some relation of homology to the dynamic
social semiotic processes that enact them” (Thibault, 91 p.ll). Students' multimodal
engagement with the screen and the texts that they produce can therefore be analyzed
as material traces of the choices that they made from the resources that were available
to them. In short consciousness and learning are understood and interpreted as a sign:
the 'consciousness externalised' (Volosinov, 1973:33).
Outside objectification, outside embodiment in some particular
material (the material of gesture, inner word, outcry) consciousness is
a fiction...But consciousness as organised, material expression (in the
ideological material of a word, a sign, drawing, colours, musical
sound, etc.) ....is an objective fact and a tremendous social force.
(Volosinov, 1973: 90-91)
61
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