The increasing digitalization of print engages students in multiple modalities of communication raising questions about the ways students are socialised in textual practices. This study explores the design and development of cross-border meaning-making practices in the context of inter-Scandinavian comprehension between Danish, Norwegian and Swedish students collaborating in virtual classrooms. Subject content and students’ interpretation and shifts across signs systems (words, images, sound) were studied combining ethnographic methods with multimodal semiotic analysis of transmediation.

The cross-border Nordic education proved to provide space for students to engage in motivating, technology-enhanced composing and communication developing linguistic, cultural, critical and digital competences through multimodal productions, collaborative sharing of knowledge and real-time meetings. In the inter-Scandinavian comprehension practices, semiotic signs became tools for thinking through parallel designing and transmediation of linguistic and semiotic choices. Students discovered meaning potentials in conscious decision of gains and losses in print and screen representations, translating in degrees between semiotic systems, dividing responsibilities and applying their own informal media competences.