Technological affordances

This short paper describes a small, ongoing case study exploring how the affordances of a media sharing Web 2.0 application (VoiceThread) can be evaluated for its pedagogical value. Web 2.0 technologies emerge so quickly it is difficult for educators to gauge their actual value in practical terms. In many cases the latest Web 2.0 technologies are superseded almost before they emerge from their beta testing phase. Rather than focusing on the individual characteristics or details of the technology itself, this case study uses a new learning design framework (the Digital Artefacts for Learner Engagement framework: DiAL-e) to chart the affordances and uses which educators might find valuable. The tool has been used as the basis of an on-line pilot project for the Joint Information Service Committee in the UK (JISC) in which academics from further and higher education have been learning how to harness the potential of digital artefacts and Web 2.0 tools to enhance teaching and student le...

Multimedia such as animations are increasingly common in science teaching. Existing research overwhelmingly focuses on developing principles for designing multimedia that support cognitive processing of information. This chapter meets an urgent need to foreground teaching and knowledge in order to develop pedagogic principles for teaching multimedia that support learning science. To do so, the chapter extends existing limited uses of the notion of ‘affordance’ to examine how the knowledge practices expressed by multimedia relate to those central to specific classroom tasks.These epistemic affordances are revealed through an innovative form of autonomy analysis that shows how the diverse elements of complex multimedia objects relate to the contents and purposes of specific classroom tasks. In-depth analyses of two contrasting examples of science teaching with animations show the pedagogic work required to integrate such multimedia and how LCT offers a way of getting to grips with these complex objects in real-world contexts.

Media technology—from mass media to social media and from video gaming to computer-mediated communication—plays an increasingly central role in people’s lives. Due to exponential increases in computing power, people now carry incredibly powerful computers—their smartphones—everywhere they go. This ever-greater access to media technology is generating an ever-greater conflict between media activities and the unmediated activities critical for psychological well-being—from our face-to-face conversations and family time to our down time and work lives. What are the costs and benefits of people’s modern media technology use for psychological well-being? Using a complementarity-interference (CI) framework, I review research to illuminate key psychological processes (i.e., mediators) and conditions (i.e., moderators) of the relationship between media technology and psychological well-being. Based on the existing evidence, I propose an initial theoretical CI model of the effects of media technology on psychological well-being. I use this CI model to outline important directions for future research, providing guidelines for an integrated, theoretically informed research on media technology.

The prehistory of the Neolithic and Copper Age of northern Italy is mainly told through the testimony of durable artefacts: pottery, stone and bone. With the exception of a few noteworthy finds, cloth is rarely considered. Of these the most significant was the discovery over twenty years ago of a frozen man and equipment of predominantly organic materials from Similaun, Val Senales (BZ) dated to c.3300 cal BC, which stimulated discussion about the types of cloth used for clothing in the Copper Age. Particular attention was paid to the absence of woven textiles and the idea that a form of twined basketry made from grass was used as a cape. About a decade later, an exhibition entitled ‘Textiles: intrecci e tessuti dalla preistoria europea’, held at the Museo Civico di Riva del Garda, brought together archaeobotanists and textile researchers who focussed, among other topics, on the evidence of tools for weaving textiles and on flax as a fibre source in northern Italy from the Early Neolithic . While this work has added significantly to the evidence and debates surrounding the types and role of cloth in the Neolithic, the evidence and understanding of the topic remains patchy. The Middle Neolithic seems to fall into one gap in the scholarship, as it is too early to justify comparison with the Iceman and too late to be associated with Early Neolithic flax. Nonetheless, some form of cloth must have existed in these societies. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to bring together recent research and new data to question the types of cloth that were used in the Middle Neolithic of northern Italy.

Whereas emerging technologies, such as touchscreen tablets, are bringing sensorimotor interaction back into mathematics learning activities, existing educational theory is not geared to inform or analyze passages from action to concept. We present case studies of tutor–student behaviors in an embodied-interaction learning environment, the Mathematical Imagery Trainer. Drawing on ecological dynamics—a blend of dynamical-systems theory and ecological psychology—we explain and demonstrate that: (a) students develop sensorimotor schemes as solutions to interaction problems; (b) each scheme is oriented on an attentional anchor—a real or imagined object, area, or other aspect or behavior of the perceptual manifold that emerges to facilitate motor-action coordination; and (c) when symbolic artifacts are introduced into the arena, they may both mediate new affordances for students’ motor-action control and shift their discourse into explicit mathematical re-visualization of the environment. Symbolic artifacts are ontological hybrids evolving from things you act with to things you think with. Students engaged in embodied-interaction learning activities are first attracted to symbolic artifacts as prehensible environmental features optimizing their grip on the world, yet in the course of enacting the improved control routines, the artifacts become frames of reference for establishing and articulating quantitative systems known as mathematical reasoning.

In response to the call in the public relations research to examine organizations’ relationship building beyond dyadic organization-public ties, this study employs a multidimensional network approach to understand relief organizations’ relationship building through different features of social media. Unlike the organizations studied in the existing public relations research, relief organizations often incorporate emergency or disaster response as part of their mission operations. Specifically, this study focuses on the organizations involved in the response actions after Typhoon Haiyan. Analysis of 66 relief organizations’ network data on Twitter and Facebook shows that organizations’ multiple types of relationships in the form of interorganizational representational networks constructed through different features of social media are closely linked during and immediately after Typhoon Haiyan. However, organizations’ positional centrality stays persistent across these networks over time, which suggests both constraints and opportunities for organizations to build relational advantages through distinct features of social media. Findings of this study show the usefulness of a multidimensional network approach in revealing the hidden patterns behind organizations’ communication behavior on social media. In doing so, this study offers more comprehensive explanations for organizations’ relationship building and relational outcomes through social media use.

This article examines the impacts of Covid19 on musicians and
music professionals in the Iranian music industry, an industry that
heavily depends on concerts and live performance. Placing the
pandemic-related restrictions in the context of larger regulatory
limitations imposed by the state, we explore how musicians navigate
and exploit existing and emerging restrictions through a
number of paradoxical developments. Addressing women’s presence
in the Iranian music industry, we also argue that focusing
exclusively on the state’s restrictions on female singers reduces
women’s agency and ignores the important ways in which female
musicians challenge existing restrictions and create opportunities
for themselves.

Selfies have been mainly discussed in the academic world from a communicative and gender perspective. With a primary focus on fitness selfies, this thesis explores the role of the smartphone while creating and sharing selfies online. It argues that studies into selfies cannot separate the social practice and role of technology. First it focuses on the concepts of self-­‐representation and mediation, and argues that there cannot be self-­‐representation in selfies without mediation. Then, by looking at technical and interface affordances, and signifiers of two widely used phones and operating systems, this thesis presents five affordances specified on self-­‐ representation through mobile media: simultaneity, editability, reviseabililty, reviewability and timeslicing. These affordances are further explored in the final chapter, which provides an analysis of four categories of fitness selfies that people deploy to represent themselves. These categories are statement of muscle growth, statement of pride, statement of complaint and statement of place.

Crowdfunding is an information technology (IT)-enabled, online model for raising funds for charity that can be used as an alternative to traditional, offline charity models (e.g., bake sales, doorknocking or society events). Over the past three years, more and more charity organizations have turned to crowdfunding in addition to, or instead of, traditional fundraising. Why is that? In this paper, we explore one case of charitable crowdfunding, the 2014 “Earthship Kapita” campaign, with particular attention to the critical role of IT. Building on the theory of IT affordances and motivation theory, we find that crowdfunding supports particular types of donor motivation (e.g., to be part of a community, to show one’s social engagement) that are not supported by traditional charity models. The analysis allows us to propose an initial model linking IT affordances and motivation in the context of charitable crowdfunding. The paper informs future research by theorizing the link between IT affordances and motivation. It informs practitioners in the charity space about why they should consider, and how they could implement, charitable crowdfunding.

How do we perceive the agency of others? Do the same rules apply when interacting with others who are radically different from ourselves, like other species or robots? We typically perceive other people and animals through their embodied behavior, as they dynamically engage various aspects of their affordance field. In second personal perception we also perceive social or interactional affordances of others. I discuss various aspects of perceptible agency, which might begin to give us some tools to understand interactions also with agents truly other than ourselves or ‘‘perhaps agents’’ like present and future social robots. Robots have various kinds of physical and behavioral presence and thus make their agency—if we want to call it that—perceptible in ways that computers and other forms of AI do not. The largely dualist assumptions pertaining to the hidden bodies of traditional Turing tests are discussed, as well as the social affordance effects of such indirect interactions as opposed to interactions in physically shared space. The question is what role various abilities to reveal, hide and dynamically control the body and broader behavior plays in heterogeneous tech or machine mediated interactions. I argue that the specifics and richness of perceptible agency matters to the kind of reciprocity we can obtain.

This short paper describes a small, ongoing case study exploring how the affordances of a media sharing Web 2.0 application (VoiceThread) can be evaluated for its pedagogical
value. Web 2.0 technologies emerge so quickly it is difficult for educators to gauge their actual value in practical terms. In many cases the latest Web 2.0 technologies are superseded almost before they emerge from their beta testing phase. Rather than focusing on the individual characteristics or details of the technology itself, this case study uses a
new learning design framework (the Digital Artefacts for Learner Engagement framework: DiAL-e) to chart the affordances and uses which educators might find valuable. The tool has been used as the basis of an on-line pilot project for the Joint Information Service Committee in the UK (JISC) in which academics from further and higher education have
been learning how to harness the potential of digital artefacts and Web 2.0 tools to enhance teaching and student learning. The initial responses from participants and tutors indicate
this is a useful instrument through which to evaluate the potential pedagogical value of a particular application set within a wider socio-cultural context.

Labels of voluntary and involuntary transparency are commonly used to respectively describe disclosures made from within and without the body that is to be made transparent. This provides an unsatisfactory framework from which to engage questions of democratic governing through transparency. Consequently, shifting to a logic of managing visibility, suggests that what is actually at stake in disclosure is whether the body that creates opportunities and limits in society compels disclosure, and thus makes it involuntary. It follows that voluntary disclosures can take many forms, but when applied to secrets of others, it offers a specific set of affordances that I introduce here as ‘radical disclosure’. This presentation/paper is the working draft introduced at ICA15 Puerto Rico. Please don't cite,  but feel free to ask me for a copy of the text.

This chapter discusses wiki in the context of the debate over seemingly ‘democratizing’ properties of Web 2.0 technologies. Basic features of wiki cannot be easily identified: it can be described as a technology of organizing primarily textual information, in a web-like hyperlinked environment, in which parts can be easily edited by one or multiple users. Tracing the origins of wiki reveals in-built social norms, stemming from the hacker culture, and the idealistic pursuits to democratize the Web. However, in practice wiki technology supports not only innovative open collaboration systems, such as Wikipedia, but also proprietary systems of organization of knowledge, largely strengthening existing power relations in organizations. Employing the concept of technology affordances, the authors outline how organizational consequences of wiki depend on the social context of its implementation.

Drawing on the model of technology-in-practice and the literature on bona fide approaches and technological affordances, this study argues that organizational actors involved in emergency response may exhibit both similar and different patterns of technology use due to the combined influence of the temporal development of the response actions, and pre-existing and newly enacted organizational, social, and technological structures. This research uses a multi-method and longitudinal case study of citizen-based response organizations after Hurricane Sandy in order to enrich the investigation. The findings demonstrate that social media were adopted in a similar manner by response organizations immediately after the hurricane but, as disaster relief evolved, there were both similarities and differences in the organizations' use of technology. This reflected the influence of emergent practices and pre-existing structures. Specifically, Twitter was used consistently for diverse purposes across the phases of the disaster response, whereas Facebook use among organizations first diverged and then converged two months after the hurricane. The organizations' different patterns of social media use also reflected the construction and reconstruction over time of the resource networks for relief operations. The originality of this study lies in its mixed-method and longitudinal design, which allows for the examination of the timing, circumstances, and outcomes of the use of technology by citizen-based response organizations. The study’s findings provide theoretical and practical knowledge about the mechanisms for integrating information systems into the building of resilient social systems for emergency response.

This article challenges how the concepts of voluntary and involuntary transparency are understood in the digital age by focusing on the management of involuntary and voluntary disclosure. We tend to understand radical transparency through new forms of involuntary networked data dissemination, spread without the consent or knowledge of whoever held the data. This view conflates the politics of exclusion with crucial questions of compulsion. At the same time, radical transparency's promise to end secrecy has not materialized. Instead, the social-material relations underpinning digital disclosures suggest they function to reconfigure visibilities of control and recognition rather than reveal extant objects. Thus, the article introduces a typology of disclosure to better understand the involuntary and autonomous and inclusive and exclusionary dimensions of managing visibility in the digital era. It then explores two sets of empirical " radical disclosure " practices, made with purpose but without consent, to articulate how digital disclosures reconfigure visibility and set limits and opportunities in society. The article concludes with a suggestion toward ramifications for governance and autonomy.

One hundred and fifty-seven representatives from 63 advocacy organizations operating in Canada were surveyed to evaluate the extent to which these groups are adopting social media, and perceive that these technologies offer affordances that contribute to the ad- vancement of activism objectives. Quantitative results of social media adoption reveal that groups are engaging with a limited selection of social media technologies (mainly Facebook and Twitter) a few times a week or more, while avoiding other options like Google+ and Tumblr. Qualitative results addressing perceived social media affordances suggest that while groups are enthusiastic about social media’s potential to strengthen outreach efforts, enable engaging feedback loops, and increase the speed of communication, they remain cautious of unproven techniques that may divert resources from strategies known to work.

This article examines the relationship between sound, creative practice and the representation of landscape and environment. It uses an analysis of a single sound art/electronic music event,
the Spectacular Suburb, a collaboration between sound recordist Chris Watson and the electronic producer/musician Matthew Herbert, as a central case study. Drawing upon interview material and the author’s own expe-riences as a curator of the event the article explores how individual sound objects are utilized subject to differing creative strategies. The article proposes a theoreti-
cal model of creativity inuenced by ecological approaches to human perception.
In particular, it suggests that for electronic musicians and sound artists creativity takes place according to complex affordance structures characterized by the rela-tionship between the physical properties of sound, a highly nuanced set of socially
constructed contexts, and specic technological and musical conventions.

Este  artículo  presenta  una  reflexión  en  torno  al  desarrollo  de  competencias  para la integración de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (tic) en la educación durante la formación inicial de profesores. En el documento, se analizan específicamente el conjunto de políticas, estándares y estrategias construidas con este propósito. A partir de los avances alcanzados y de la ca-racterización de las dinámicas de producción de conocimiento en la sociedad contemporánea, surge la pregunta por las posibilidades que lasticen sí mismas pueden proveer a la formación inicial de profesores en el desarrollo de sus competencias para integrarlas en la educación. Por otro lado, también se indaga si las nuevas tendencias de aprendizaje, materializadas en los conceptos de affordance y ecologías del aprendizaje, pueden convertirse en rutas apropiadas para afianzar su desarrollo. Se considera que una perspectiva ecológica para el aprendizaje, construida a partir de los affordances o potencialidades de las tic, puede fortalecer la integración de la relación entre educación y tecnología en la formación docente, que hasta la fecha se ha pensado de manera inde-pendiente y desarticulada

This essay considers the question of transfer in relation to processes of remediation. In particular, we explore the interrelationships between transfer and new media in multiliteracy center contexts. Drawing on a case study of an undergraduate student named Sophie, we offer a multidimensional approach called adaptive remediation that helps composers develop meta-awareness about how they might use and reshape prior composing knowledge and available semiotic resources in ways to suit media affordances and their rhetorical objectives in processes of remediation. Specifically, we propose four dimensions of adaptive remediation, including charting, inventorying, coordinating, and literacy linking. Our hope is that adaptive remediation will prepare multiliteracy center directors and consultants to help students transfer knowledge across media and, in the process, make rhetorically sound decisions about how to adapt and reuse literacies, skills, and ideas in a variety of contexts. Published by Elsevier Inc.

The emergence of Cloud Computing (CC) in low technology contexts like Nigeria may require the teacher’s perception of its uses or affordances for effective exploitation however, there is no standardized tool designed for assessing user affordances. This paper reports part of a study that sought to understand how Teacher Educators (TEs), Student Teachers (STs) and IT managers perceived the uses of CC for Language Teacher Education (LTE). The study adopted a mixed method approach and involved seventy-six randomly selected participants from the College of Education Zuba Abuja, Nigeria. The participants were asked to use the College portal and give their perceptions of CC affordances present, absent, and problematic. These were analysed using a content analysis matrix from which checklist was developed. Although the paper is limited in scope but implications of its findings for language teacher education indicate that the checklist may enable assessors to effectively compare and classify participants’ perception of affordances for example, the study indicates that user needs may be interactive, universal or peculiar thus, language educators may find the checklist useful in planning, designing and implementing inclusive teacher focused IT programmes. The checklist may be effective because it enhances human performance, standardizes tasks, facilitates team coordination and ensures that procedures are followed correctly and reduces reliance on human memory alone as can be seen from the results emerging from the study. The checklist should be drawn up and administered by a multidisciplinary team with one coordinating leader. Tasks and roles have to shared and delegated as the context demands

Authors: Dr. Kirsty Best (Murdoch University), Stephanie Butler (McMaster University).

In this article, the authors present results from an ongoing study of individuals with ME/CFS who are using the virtual reality site, Second Life, as a medium for social support networks. We expand on Norman, Hartson and Best’s categories of affordances by proposing an additional four tiered framework for the categorization of types of communication breakdowns that occur in human–computer
interactions. The four proposed categories are: human–computer; computer–network; human–network; and finally, technologically mediated human–human. This proposed mode of categorizing the data allows for a greater depth of analysis into the causes of complex communication errors, and participants’ reactions to these disruptions in relation to their experiences of control. Each of the four categories is assessed according to the types of affordances indicated in the technological issues and whether they were reported as positive or negative by the participants of the study. The information is then analyzed according to the categories of users’ attitudes toward technology. The final level of
communication error, that between human participants in technologically mediated conversation, leads to the positing of three categories of users: audio communicators; textual communicators; and flexible communicators. These conflicting communication preferences, or needs, are found to have a profoundly negative impact on group dynamics.

There is increasing recognition of the role of images, and visualization, in creating new knowledge in science, indicating potential parallels between creative processes in science and in art. This chapter presents case studies to illustrate how art has intersected with science ideas, and the commonalities and differences between creative visual processes in art compared to science. The cases are chosen to illuminate the contribution of art to science, the role of visualization in reasoning leading to new theorising in science, and scientific analyses in the service of aesthetic programs in art. The construct of affordances is used to illuminate the differences between artistic and scientific endeavour. We explore a school science pedagogy in which students construct visual and embodied representations, which more authentically demonstrates the imaginative processes through which knowledge is created in science, and the intersections between these two disciplines in knowledge creation. We argue that art and science are both centrally characterised by representation construction, but differ fundamentally in their driving purposes, with corresponding differences in engaging affordance, which we see as a fundamental construct for understanding the nature of reasoning and cognizing in both areas.

... beat gesture whose location relative to the utterance was precisely controlled in a frame-by-frame fashion. ... movement or series of movements of the hand or hands that can gauge and influence both the ... Symmetry, broken symmetry, and the dynamics of bimanual coordination. ...

We investigated how a listener’s perceived meaning of a spoken sentence is influenced
by the relative timing between a speaker’s speech and accompanying hand gestures.
Participants viewed a computer-animated character who uttered the phrase,
“Put the book there now.” while executing a simple right-handed beat gesture whose
location relative to the utterance was precisely controlled in a frame-by-frame fashion.
The participant’s task consisted of making a judgment about two related aspects
of the actor’s perceived speech: (a) Which word was emphasized? and (b) How clear
was the emphasis? That is, did it make sense? The results revealed that the perceived
emphasis was determined by the timing (phasing) of the speaker’s hand gesture. Furthermore,
the clarity of the perceived emphasis (i.e., meaningfulness) was influenced
by the affordances in the immediate environment of the speaker. Discussion addresses
the primacy of ostensive specification and gesture in communicative events,
the dynamics of speech-hand coordination during both actual and virtual dialogue,
and the role of environmental affordances in grounding informative communicative
acts in the ecology of organism-environment dynamics.

The promises of nanotechnology have been framed by a variety of metaphors, that not only channel the attention of the public, orient the questions asked by researchers, and convey epistemic choices closely linked to ethical preferences. In particular, the image of the ‘therapeutic missile’ commonly used to present targeted drug delivery devices emphasizes precision, control, surveillance and efficiency. Such values are highly praised in the current context of crisis of pharmaceutical innovation where military metaphors foster a general mobilization of resources from multiple fields of cutting-edge research. The missile metaphor, reminiscent of Paul Ehrlich’s ‘magic bullet’, has framed the problem in simple terms: how to deliver the right dose in the right place at the right moment? Chemists, physicists and engineers who design multi-functional devices operating in vitro can think in such terms, as long as the devices are not actually operating through the messy environment of the body. A close look at what has been done and what remains to be done suggests that the metaphor of the “therapeutic missile” is neither sufficient, nor even necessary. Recent developments in nanomedicine suggest that therapeutic efficacy cannot be obtained without negotiating with the biological milieu and taking advantage of what it affords. An ‘oïkological’ approach seems more appropriate, more heuristic and more promising than the popular missile. It is based on the view of organism as an oikos that has to be carefully managed. The dispositions of nanocapsules have to be coupled with the affordances of the environment. As it requires dealing with nanoparticles as relational entities (defined by their potential for interactions) rather than as stable substances (defined by intrinsic properties) this metaphor eventually might well change research priorities in nanotechnology in general.

In this article, I examine lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA) Tumblr bloggers’ bio boxes and “About Me” pages to show the ways gender and sexual orientation identities are constructed through community-regulated and community-generated labeling practices. Tumblr encourages counter-cultures (and labeling practices) to not only form but also to thrive due to its distinctive affordances including tagging and blog formatting. This article examines not only how these affordances shape usage and, subsequently, identity construction on Tumblr but also the ways in which Tumblr bloggers have embraced affordances to create community-accepted conventions of identity construction. Additionally, building upon online identity scholarship by Bargh, McKenna, and Fitzsimons and Tiidenberg, this article discusses true self and nonbinary gender and sexual orientation labeling as forms of identity construction that allows LGBTQIA identifying individuals a method for nuanced descriptions of feelings and desires. However, far from perfect, these labeling practices are also grounded in hegemonic female/male, feminine/masculine binary discourse. In a Foucauldian sense, bloggers construct discourse within existing power structures that ignore or erase LGBTQIA as sexual “abnormalities.” Although it is nearly impossible to fully break away from the dominant discourse, these labeling practices can be a useful starting point for conversations about genders and sexualities that lie outside of the hegemonic binary.

It is a strategic decision how people find their place in digital media platforms. Such decisions are navigated by structures of power and social constructions like culture, class, gender, media, technology, and individual maneuvers. TikTok has been a haven for everyday people in Turkey. This study analyzed how and why that is the case. Looking at the content on TikTok and critically engaging with discursive practices around TikTok and TikTokers, this chapter argues that "cringe" people, who do not share a specific taste and cultural capital, show their presence in TikTok due to technological affordances TikTok offers, the cultural climate in other platforms, and the carnivalesque which they experience on TikTok. It might look like they are only producing dance or dubbing videos, but they claim a cultural sphere. The mediation of this culture, however, is some times encouraging and empowering, and sometimes is toxic.