Researchers have theorised on the representational side of technology-based
mathematical activity by looking at the ways students recognise the affordances of the tools to generate mathematical meaning. The semiotic dimension of mathematical knowledge has become more intertwined with the awareness of the mediational role of technological mathematical representations, as semiotic systems are changed by the ntroduction of digital technologies. One emergent conclusion is that mathematics and technology cannot be seen as disjoint and the role of technology cannot even be reduced to conversions between representational systems (Artigue & Bardini, 2010). In the same vein, Borba and Villarreal (2005) argue that the processes mediated by technologies lead to a reorganization of the human mind itself: knowledge is an outcome of a symbiosis of humans and technology – a new entity they named humans-with-media. This concept also discloses a sociocultural perspective of the
human mind, in the sense proposed by Wertsch (1991) when assuming that every “action is mediated and (…) cannot be separated from the milieu in which it is carried out” (p. 18). The notion of humans-with-media is supported by two main ideas: (i) cognition has a social and collective nature that (ii) comprises tools which mediate the production of knowledge. The key issue is that media are considered a constitutive part of the subject and cannot be seen as auxiliary or supplementary. The media that are used to communicate, to produce or represent mathematical ideas, influence the kind of mathematics as well as of mathematical thinking that is developed. This means that different collectives of humans-with-media originate different thinking: for instance, the mathematics produced by humans-with-paper-and-pencil is qualitatively different from that produced by humans-with-computers (Borba & Villarreal, 2005).