Category:Affordances and constraints of learning technologies

The contents on affordances and constraints of learning technologies were written by students enrolled during the Summer and Fall, 2013 sessions of course Education 6620, Issues and Trends in Educational Computing at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

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 20 primary sources specifically on the technology. The sources are from peer-reviewed, educational-technology journals. Each entry consists of approximately 1000 words along with hyperlinks to five online resources 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.