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

I use ‘activity theory’ as a framework to think about sign making and learning beyond
the individual. This enables the social forces that ‘lie behind’ (and produce) a
student’s interaction with a computer in a school classroom to be held in mind
throughout the multimodal social semiotic analysis presented in the thesis. I use the
framework of activity theory as theoretical lens for thinking about the classroom and
to consider the rules, norms, and social roles of people within communities that
underpin semiotic mediation and sign making. I address the question of how the
computer as a semiotic tool can re-mediate learning throughout the analysis. The
concepts of a ‘subject’, ‘object’, and ‘mediational tool’ are used as a basic framework
for thinking about how students refer to the material for study or the problem space
that they are working with and how they bring the tools of the computer to bear on it.
The concepts of ‘rules’, ‘community’ and ‘the division of labour’ enable me to
understand semiotic mediation in the wider social context of school learning and to
examine how new technology re-mediates the values, roles, and community of the
classroom and the curriculum. That is I analyse students’ sign making within the
activity system of the school.

Throughout the thesis I treat signs as the result of a sign maker’s (socially situated)
selection of Criterial aspects of what it is that they wish to signify. I analyse the
relationship between meaning and form as constantly realised in the process of sign
making and it follows from this that I treat signs as always newly made.
Understanding signs as motivated and transformative raises the matter of what
semiotic resources are available to choose from given the meaning that the sign
maker wants to make in a specific context. I examine how students take up and use
these resources, transform them and design meaning in Part II of the thesis. In this
way signs are interpreted as one kind of evidence of the sign maker’s interest and
cognitive work. The fundamental connection between external material signs, inner
signs and cognitive development supports this. Computer applications are interpreted
as one kind of evidence of the choices made by their makers. The computer
applications that I examine are viewed both as the actualisation of the design of the

88

<<   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   >>

More intriguing information