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Semiotic resources such as digital technologies have become the tools of the trade in various social practices and are promoting the digital globalization of educational contexts. Through constant renewals, technological impacts on education have elicited several challenges. This paper advocates a theoretical study on how digital technologies can challenge social settings, a conceptualization guiding upcoming empirical explorations on digital technologies in education. By synthesizing research data, new theoretical propositions can be initiated based on previous empirical analyses. An extended critical perception of technologies’ social agency and how technologies regulate meaning-makers’ social, political, and economic life can be obtained as an understanding of the democratization of the Internet space. The following research questions were used; During the last five years, what effects do digital technologies have on social practice, and how can the effects be theoretically conceptualized? Peer-reviewed research papers addressing digital technologies between 2017 and 2022 will be retrieved from scholarly databases. Through meta-synthesis strategies, theoretical conceptualizations of the consequences different digital platforms for Internet navigation and social media have on social practices will be obtained. Findings indicate that the association between the concepts of calculation center, platform leadership, immaterial labor, and mindshare is interesting to strengthen critical perspectives on technical agencies for understanding the democratization of the Internet space. We conclude that there is a need for continuous critical expansion of theories to enrich educational research with tools for problematizing the digital globalization.

The multimodal effects in the design of digital technologies on students' meaning-making need to be further explored in research and practice. This chapter aims to unpack the connections between technological design and students' cognitive processes to understand how meaning-making via technology use is multimodally realized. A layered semiotic analysis of students' use of common technologies and design features in learning activities demonstrates that the technological activation of meaning potentials interacts with students' actualizations in scaled cognitive processing that determine multimodal meaning-making. These findings illustrate how technological affordances emerge in practice, which are vital to consider in research and for pedagogical practices involved in a multimodal realization of learning activities within the contemporary digitization of education.

The relationships between digital technologies and the realization of teaching and learning activities havereceived increased attention in interdisciplinary research. Knowledge of the connections between technologicaldesigns and users’ meaning making in semiotic chains is, however, still partial. Teachers’ and students’ remediationof technological designs through cognitive processing was studied in this paper to gain insights intosemiotic chain configurations. Data consisting of video recordings, interviews, and observations were processedwith quantitative content analysis and learning analytics strategies. The findings suggest that the technologicaldesign’s visualized functions greatly affect the semiotic chain configuration when integrated with their users’meaning making in lower-level actions. Technological designs seem to buttonize meaning making, and teachingand learning activities become technologized. Scaled cognitive processes can provide insights into differentiatedmeaning making according to the technologies, and perspectives on paralanguage are proposed.

This paper put an approximation of Actor-Network Theory – ANT (cf. Callon & Latour, 1981; Latour, 1988; Latour, 1993; Latour, 1994) and representational philosophies deriving from the social semiotic multimodal theories (e.g., Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2021; van Leeuwen, 2005) to the fore to conceptualize how meaning-making (known as sign-making, learning, the process of signification, Bateman, 2018; Bezemer & Kress, 2016; Kress, 2010) via technologies come about from the technologies' various prompts. It is essential to recognize how representations such as semiotic resources – here, technologies and sign systems – have agency to form social practices. They are agentively selected, interpreted, and acted upon by the user into meaning-making activities (Jewitt, 2008, 2009, 2014). The technologies' front- and back-end properties' semiotic regimes (van Leeuwen, 2005; Djonov & van Leeuwen, 2018a) in different configurations can function as actants by symmetrically translating interests between humans and non-humans, into hybrid existences (Callon & Latour, 1981; Latour, 1994). Humans and technical objects are not rigid and independent substances (Platonic) but beings in constant (re)associations, which modify their existence (Callon & Latour, 1981; Latour, 1994). In that sense, Callon and Latour's claims can be understood in line with the genesis and development of representations that, from a historical epistemological perspective (Wartofsky, 1979), are in constant (re)associations by technologies, cultures, social practices, and humans. As humans mediate by means of their representations (Wartofksy, 1979), the representations are re-shaping and re-shaped through the history of reproduction that impacts interaction, meditation, and meaning-making (Kress, 2010; van Leeuwen, 2005; Wartofsky, 1979). The purpose of this paper is to briefly sketch a future research aspiration striving to theoretically approximate the ANT and representational philosophies and examine what kind of agency digital technologies impose on the users and how the users draw upon that imposition in their meaning-making. Crucially, such a reflection can heighten current understandings of the intricate relationships and networks created by humans and digital technologies in contemporary learning settings such as school to better appreciate students' digital learning from a representational agency perspective integrating the “signifieds-in-transformation” and “actants.” In preparation for future research studies, the following research question guides the theoretical explorations: who acts in the process of signification in learning activities with digital technologies?

The adoption and use of semiotic resources in education such as digital technologies and sign systems (Selander & Svärdemo-Åberg, 2008; van Leeuwen, 2005) have in the last few years been vastly upscaled in the Swedish educational system. Although various semiotic resources have been common features in Swedish learning settings for over a decade, the drastic changes brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic have promoted hasty adoption of different resources to keep the guidelines and recommendations to contain viral transmission brought forth by different authorities (The Swedish Government, 2021). These procedures have un-helpfully backgrounded implementation strategies and qualitative selection procedures (Schiavetto & Schnaider, 2021). Such rapid shifts and the implementation of a much wider range of semiotic resources render several challenges for their integration and use in learning activities (PanMeMic, 2020). This study investigates what kind of changes among semiotic resources have occurred during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and what possible effects the adoption of certain resources can have on creating different learning conditions. To explore these relationships the following research questions guided our examinations of empirical data: During the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, what changes in adoption and use of semiotic resources have been discussed by the Swedish authorities? What are the effects on the learning conditions?

Text data addressing various measures related to the adoption and use of semiotic resources in the Swedish educational systems posted between March 2020 and November 2021 on the Swedish government’s webpages was manually downloaded and rendered approximately 80 pages of raw text data. A simple version of content analysis (Silverman, 2006) was used to examine the different authorities’ discourses with a focus on the semiotic resources digital technologies, and sign-systems. Combined with quantitative ethnography (QE) methodology and techniques (Shaffer, 2017; Ruis & Lee, 2021), systematic data processing, coding, and analysis were quantitatively conducted with software nCoder (Hinojosa, Siebert-Evenstone, Eagan, Swiecki, Gleicher, & Marquart, 2019) and ENA (Marquart, Hinojosa, Swiecki, Ea-gan, & Shaffer, 2018).

The ENA result indicates that the massive adoption of Big Techs' digital platforms has been a strategy to enable the continuity of learning, from mostly face-to-face to online modes. Despite being aimed a continuity, such shifts in semiotic resources to enable online learning affects the concrete social learning context, and raises questions about the impact of the semiotic resources on education. Thus, semiotic resources have a social agency character where changes in forms act in the reorganization of the concrete social context and influence how meanings can be created during human-technical interactions. This article presents a brief investigation on how sociopolitical characteristics related to virtual learning environments become operated by Big Techs' digital platforms, which have been solidifying themselves as mandatory global crossing points (Latour, 2004) for education during the COVID-19 pan-demic. The results emphasize that “what forms make us do” (Latour, 1994) is vital to recognize, especially as algorithms and personal data have impacts on educational environments aimed at promoting critical and democratic citizenship.

Challenges that arise during a time of crisis, as the current COVID-19 pandemic, are a basis for recognizing how different governments handle the governance of units such as schools and issues related to democracy and social inequality. By paying attention to similar or contrasting issues in the political welfare states’ characteristics and organization, the crisis's impact on different countries can be identified and can provide learning examples beyond the study's phenomena. Although Brazil and Sweden are historically and culturally diverse countries, they also share similarities in being politicized by global trends such as neoliberalism. The paper examines the two governments' discourses and how centralization, decentralization, and neoliberalism and the resulting shift to privatized public services can form a basis for understanding declines in democracy and social inequality in schooling in both countries. The following research question guides the work, how are democracy and social inequality expounded in Brazil's and Sweden's way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic? To investigate how democracy and social inequality were expounded in Brazil's and Sweden's way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a quantitative ethnographic approach to analyze the government's discourses. With quantitative ethnographic techniques we identified how the states organized discussions and actions to investigate and solve socio-educational issues related to democracy and how access to resources for education related to inequalities. The governmental intensity of keeping the economy functioning was observed to be influenced by the advance of neoliberalism in both countries. In organizing the education during the COVID-19 pandemic neoliberalism is pertaining to authoritarianism in Brazil and more culturally contingent actions related to the ethos - "openness" - in Sweden. 

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration of The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020 Manifesto continues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though the Manifesto was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is that The Manifesto for Teaching Online offers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.

The relationship between sign systems and the meaning potentials and affordances of multimodal technologies has received increasing attention in research on digital technology use in education. Students constantly adhere to and engage with semiotic shifts in sign systems when they work with digital technologies for learning purposes. This study explores students’ use of digital technologies in Swedish schools. We trace the way semiotic activity systems and cognitive processes are transformed and realized when students engage with shifts in sign systems into various meaning-making strategies. Methodologically, the study is based on a data set of video recordings, interviews, and observations of classroom practice in three primary schools. An analysis that draws on quantitative ethnography was applied to process and analyse the data. The main findings revealed that sign systems prompted by the technologies and the social space compete to some extent for students’ attention, and that technology design is monotonously rendering lower levels of mediation. These findings show that various sign system prompts need to be balanced and streamlined to support students in their meaning-making. This article conveys the importance of understanding sign systems, as they are the most common resources for technology-assisted learning, and change the prerequisites for meaning-making.

Semiotic technologies manifest semiotic resources through differently configured interfaces where the “media” and the user interchangeably transform what is perceived (Ravelli & van Leeuwen, 2018; Vigild Poulsen et al., 2018). The semiotic resources are necessary learning resources that have recently become upscaled in significance as different technologies are frequently used for meaning-making purposes. Although many agents are rather confident in using various technologies, the shift in semiotic resources poses several challenges for meaning-making practices (PanMeMic, 2020). Mainly, interpretation efforts demand a recognition of the semiotic shifts of differently configured interfaces as well as how the resources are reshaped from their meaning-potentials and affordances in cognitive processing and newly prompted into the social space through the actors’ meaning-making (Kress, 2010). This creates complexity and multiplicity that variously shapes the prerequisites for meaning-making and constitutes the semiotic activity system. The presentation will illustrate how the semiotic shifts can be identified by tracing semiotic resources, with a focus on sign-systems within the multimodal layer framework (ML) (Schnaider et al., 2020). The MLs define sign-systems as the connector between the multimodal nature of composite interfaces and the multimodal character of meaning-making that shifts through technological activation and cognitive processes of actions and sign-making. The five MLs - technologies, technologies’ functional properties and semiotic properties, modes of representation, and activities – have been used in educational settings as a tool for analysis but apply to any environment to understand how sign-systems transfer across human and technological processes.