Support material for students participating in Introduction to Learning and Educational Technology course.

Learning & Educational Technology Research Unit Faculty of Education University of Oulu, Finland OVERVIEW: Education is always a unique combination of technological, social, and educational contexts and affordances. Classical educational contexts, for example, are often competitive (educational) and individual (social), with students working at their own place on their own (physical and technical). Group learning, on the other hand, makes use of collaborative or cooperative pedagogies (educational), in groups (social), and provides a group workspace with the necessary assortment of materials (physical and technical). CSCL represents yet another learning situation. The educational context is collaborative, the social context is the group, and the technological context is a computer-mediated setting. (P . Kirschner, Strijbos, Karel Kreijns, & Beers, 2004)

Figure 1 - Usefulness is determined by various types of affordances (P. Kirschner et al., 2004)

A. Technological affordances:

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Support material for students participating in Introduction to Learning and Educational Technology course. Learning & Educational Technology Research Unit Faculty of Education University of Oulu, Finland

B. UTILITY Educational and social functionality

1. Educational functionality Educational affordances (P. Kirschner, 2002)
Educational affordances are those characteristics of an artifact (e.g., how a chosen educational paradigm is implemented) that determine if and how a particular learning behavior could possibly be enacted within a given context (e.g., project team, distributed learning community). Educational affordances can be defined - analogous to social affordances - as the relationships between the properties of an educational intervention and the characteristics of the learner (for CSCL: learner and learning group) that enable particular kinds of learning by him/her (for CSCL: members of the group too).

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Support material for students participating in Introduction to Learning and Educational Technology course. Learning & Educational Technology Research Unit Faculty of Education University of Oulu, Finland

Figure - Examples of pedagogical affordances according (Mcloughlin & Lee, 2007)

a. Social affordances (K Kreijns & P A. Kirschner, 2002) .

Social affordances are properties of CSCL environment that act as social-contextual facilitators relevant for the learners social interactions. When they are perceptible, they invite the learner to act in accordance with the perceived affordances, i.e., start a task or non-task related interaction or communication. This definition of social affordance is inspired by the term technological affordance. Both are specializations of the general term affordance described by Gibson (1986). (K Kreijns & P. A. Kirschner, 2002) Examples of theoretical principles: (P. Kirschner, 2002) o Shared understanding: the state where two or more people have equivalent expectations about a situation, i.e., their explanations of the situation and their predictions for how it might develop are the same. A lack of shared understanding often leads to coordination breakdowns (mismatch between expectations of one participant and actions of another) or conflict (the perception of opposing goals, aims, and values). o Accountability: the social mechanism underlying responsible behavior; e.g., not plagiarizing a fellow team member, not working for the disadvantage of a fellow team member. Trust: the deciding factor in a social process that results in a decision by an individual to accept or reject a risk based on the expectation that another party will meet the performance requirements (Zolin, Fruchter, & Levitt, 2000). Social cohesion: the tendency of group members to stick together (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991) and the sum of all forces which act on individuals to stay in a group (Festinger,1968). Simply stated: the tendency of group members to like and trust one another.

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Support material for students participating in Introduction to Learning and Educational Technology course. Learning & Educational Technology Research Unit Faculty of Education University of Oulu, Finland o Predictability: the quality of a situation that allows those in that situation to foretell that - on the basis of observation, experience, or scientific reason - an expected outcome will turn out to be the actual outcome. Examples of social actions (Hanrahan, Ahuja, Perez-Quinones, & Kavanaugh, 2011) o social browsing and searching in the context of Facebook, but the concepts are generalizable to SNSs. o Interaction - We include any kind of direct interaction between two or more individuals via the medium of the social network site in our definition of interaction. Sharing Content - Several social network sites are centered around the activity of users sharing content - YouTube and Flickr being popular mainstream examples. Collaboration - The concept of working together towards a common goal, or Collaboration, has a cyclic cause-effect relationship with social capital - both are beneficial to each other. Examples of social Features (Hanrahan et al., 2011) o Tagging - Web-based tagging systems let users annotate a particular resource, such as a web page, a blog post, an image, or about any object with a freely chosen set of keywords. Tags usually support finding and sharing content. o Activity Streams - Are flowing commentaries on users actions on the different sections of the site and are an effective way of discovering content. User Profiles - User profiles are central to the concept of a Social Networking Site. Profiles provide users their identity on the system, and aid in discovery of common interests and articulating relationships. Comments - Comments are the primary conversational medium on SNSs, and often express social relationships. Ratings and Votes - Ratings are a fundamental component of reputation systems for users of SNSs. These reputation systems hold value in certain areas and have been found to facilitate interaction, trust, and limit aversive behavior.

References
Hanrahan, B., Ahuja, S., Perez-Quinones, M., & Kavanaugh, A. (2011). Evaluating software for communities using social affordances. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA 11 (p. 1621). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1979742.1979818 Kirschner, P. (2002). Can we support CSCL? Educational, social and technological affordances for learning. (Paul A Kirschner, Ed.)Three Words of CSCL Can we Support CSCL. Open Universiteit Nederland. Retrieved from http://www.ou.nl/Docs/Expertise/NELLL/publicaties/Three%20worlds%20of%20CSCL %20Can%20we%20support%20CSCL.pdf Kirschner, P., Strijbos, J.-W., Kreijns, Karel, & Beers, P. J. (2004). Designing electronic collaborative learning environments. Educational Technology Research and Development, 52(3), 47-66. Springer Boston. doi:10.1007/BF02504675 Kreijns, K, & Kirschner, P A. (2002). The Sociability of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments. (R. Bromme, F. W. Hesse, & H. Spada, Eds.)Educational Technology & Society, 5(1), 822. Springer. Retrieved from http://www.ifets.info/journals/5_1/kreijns.html

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Support material for students participating in Introduction to Learning and Educational Technology course. Learning & Educational Technology Research Unit Faculty of Education University of Oulu, Finland Mcloughlin, C., & Lee, M. J. W. (2007). Social software and participatory learning Pedagogical choices : with technology affordances in the Web 2 . 0 era Introduction: Social trends and challenges. Current, 664-675. Retrieved from http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/referral/advsearch/http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/singapore07/ procs/mcloughlin.pdf Nielsen, J. (1994). Heuristic evaluation. In J Nielsen & R. L. Mack (Eds.), Usability Inspection Methods (Vol. 17, pp. 25-62). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. doi:10.1089/tmj.2010.0114 Thompson, A.-J., & Kemp, E. A. (2009). Web 2.0: extending the framework for heuristic evaluation. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference NZ Chapter of the ACMs Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction - CHINZ '09 (pp. 29-36). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/1577782.1577788

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