Search results for "affordances"
showing 9 items of 39 documents
The Playful Affordances of Picture Book Apps for Children
2021
The tradition of children’s literature has evolved side by side with the market of children’s entertainment, games, and toys. The selection of contemporary print products includes a wide variety of materially or technologically enhanced picture books. This background is rarely considered in the examination of children’s book applications that have attracted scholarly interest after the arrival of smartphones and tablets during the early 2010s.The relationship between picture book apps, mobile games, and digital playthings requires further examination that considers the specific affordances of the mobile platform. Leaning on five case studies, this article examines how picture book apps affo…
An Ecological Conceptualization of Extreme Sports
2018
Currently, there are various definitions for extreme sports and researchers in the field have been unable to advance a consensus on what exactly constitutes an ‘extreme’ sport. Traditional theory-led explanations, such as edgeworks, sensation seeking and psychoanalysis, have led to inadequate conceptions. These frameworks have failed to capture the depth and nuances of experiences of individuals who refute the notions of risk-taking, adrenaline- and thrill-seeking or death-defiance. Instead, participants are reported to describe experiences as positive, deeply meaningful and life-enhancing. The constant evolution of emerging participation styles and philosophies, expressed within and across…
Silence and Resistance as Experiences and Presentations of Pupil Agency in Finnish Elementary School English Lessons
2014
This paper explores the multitude of ways in which Finnish fifth and sixth grade elementary school pupils experience and present their agency in English lessons, with a special focus on pupils' silence and resistance. Pupil agency is often seen as observable action that is oriented towards institutionally accepted goals and norms. In communicative and constructivist understandings of foreign language learning, learner agency is related to the idea of learning by participating. Participation in the classroom is not only individually but also socially constrained. This article is based on a larger, ecologically oriented ethnographic study on fifth and sixth graders' language learner identitie…
Formation and Mitigation of Technostress in the Personal Use of IT
2022
Understanding information technology (IT) use is vital for the information systems (IS) discipline due to its substantial positive and negative consequences. In recent years, IT use for personal purposes has grown rapidly. Although personal use is voluntary and can often reflect fun, technostress is a common negative consequence of such use. When left unaddressed, technostress can cause serious harm to IT users. However, prior research has not explained how technostress forms over time or how its mitigation takes place in a personal—rather than organizational—environment. To address these research gaps, we conducted a qualitative study with narrative interviews of IT users who had experienc…
Affordances and Agential Realism : A Relational Ontology for a Relational Theory
2018
Relational view of affordance theory has emerged as a viable theory in Information Systems (IS) research to explain variation in IS use. According to this theory, what a specific person can achieve with a technology is neither inherent in the person himself nor on the technology but emerges from their interaction. Despite that such relational view implies relational ontology, the ontological foundations have been insufficiently theorized which limits both its practical and theoretical applicability and explanatory power. In this paper, I suggest that Karen Barad’s relational ontology, known as agential realism, provides coherent and solid foundations for affordances that are especially suit…
Examining the longitudinal relationship between visibility and persistence on stress and technology-assisted supplemental work
2023
This study examines the longitudinal relationship between two affordances of organizational information and communication technologies (ICTs)—that is, visibility and persistence—and individuals’ subjective stress and technology-assisted supplemental work (TASW). We propose that visibility and persistence associated with organizational ICTs are often more aptly construed as probabilities for action, rather than merely possibilities for action. The hypotheses are tested using latent change structural equation modeling drawing on two-wave survey data from 437 employees of a global industrial logistics company headquartered in a Nordic country. The findings highlight that visibility is associat…
Trust-oriented affordances: A five-country study of news trustworthiness and its socio-technical articulations
2022
Research on trust has come to the forefront of communication studies. Beyond the dominant focus on informational trust and its country-specific articulations, trustworthiness evaluations can relate to the materiality of news and its global manifestations. Especially in digital algorithmic environments, understanding news trustworthiness requires a holistic approach, which combines informational and socio-technical aspects while addressing both institutional and interpersonal trust. Drawing on 488 in-depth interviews with media consumers in Argentina, Finland, Israel, Japan, and the United States, this article investigates news (dis)trust from the lens of socio-materiality. The six trust-or…
How secondary school pupils bring their informal learning experiences into a Content and Language Integrated (CLIL) classroom
2014
This article explores how students’ informal language learning experiences with English find their way into the formal context of content-based language teaching (CLIL). The analysis is focused on stretches of classroom talk in which native Finnish-speaking students draw on their expertise of English-language popular culture, and use their knowledge as a semiotic resource for producing various types of actions. Based on the data, it is argued that the organisation of peer group talk in the language classroom provides students with affordances for participation that are characteristically different from whole-class interaction. In this environment, global popular culture and conversational h…
Teachers’ professional agency in a centralisation-decentralisation system and a hierarchical cultural context : the case of Hong Kong
2022
Teachers are frontline actors in actualising educational innovations. In some contexts, teachers’ professional agency is undervalued. This study investigated teachers’ agency and its related workplace affordances in Hong Kong, which features a centralised-decentralisation education governance system, and a hierarchical work culture. The study was based on 21 semi-structured interviews with teachers, and employed a deductive thematic analysis. Agency enactment was categorised into 1) pedagogical agency within classrooms, and 2) relational agency in the professional community. The factors contributing to workplace affordances were grouped as pertaining to 1) the collegial community, 2) school…