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

I interpret student’s material expressions, signs, images, writing, gestures, and so on
as one trace of the expression of students’ engagement with knowledge in the
classroom: one kind of evidence of what their thinking and learning may have been
like.

Summary

In this thesis I use a multimodal approach to technology-mediated learning drawing
on social semiotic theory and activity theory. I show that each mode offers different
Communicational and representational resources and that understanding learning
requires all modes of communication, not only speech and writing to be brought into
the analytical frame. The concepts used in the thesis include, mode, semiotic
resource, materiality, modal affordance, functional specialisation, functional load of
modes, the interaction of modes, semiotic mediation and activity system. (Each of
these concepts has been described above, how they are operationalised analytically is
discussed in the next chapter.) From this perspective modes provide people with a
range of semiotic resources or meaning potentials with different representational and
Communicational affordances. These modal resources shape meaning and knowledge
in distinct ways.

I treat sign making as an active process in which people bring together form
(signifiers) and meanings (signified), in which they select the most apt signifier for
the meaning that they wish to signify at a given moment and context. I theorise sign
making as a multimodal motivated and transformative process. I understand this
motivation as the result of the complex interaction of the sign maker’s ‘interest’ (at a
specific moment in a specific context), the rules and norms of the school and the
school classroom, the curriculum and the histories of subject knowledge, and the
roles of teacher and students.

This approach to sign making is significant for thinking about learning as a
multimodal process. Students are understood to be actively making signs selecting,

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