Affordances and constraints of learning technologies

The contents on affordances and constraints of learning technologies were written by students enrolled in course Education 6620, Issues and Trends in Educational Computing at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada with Elizabeth Murphy.

Affordances (Gibson, 1979) are properties of technology that facilitate activity (Norman, 1993, p. 244)] and create "possibilities for agentic action" (Hutchby, 2001, p. 444). Constraints limit the affordances and the properties of action associated with them.

The students' contributions are evidenced-based. Specifically, this means that all entries in this category are based on findings from a minimum of 15 primary sources with the technology in the title. The sources are from peer-reviewed, educational-technology journals. Each entry consists of approximately 1000 words along with hyperlinks to five online resources specifically on the learning technology.

References

Gibson, J. J. (1979).The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology., 35(2), 441-456. doi: 10.1017/S0038038501000219

Norman, D. A. (1993). Things that make us smart: Defending human attributes in the age of the machine New York, NY: Addison-Wesley.