Affordance of Tools

Conole & Dyke (2004a):

At the beginning of the article, they pointed the importance for researchers to grasp the notion of affordance and limitation of technology. They defined affordances as the “perceived and actual properties of a thing, which defines how the thing could possibly be used”. They analyzed the affordances issue from the following perspectives: accessibility, speed of change. Both of them mentioned the issue of information overload and one issue brought up by rapidly change of information is people’s lack of reflective thoughts and authority of the information source. Technology also brings diversity to people. Information technology provides people with others’ experiences and situates people in a broader context of experiences and cultural environment. Technology also enriched people’s learning by providing collaborative opportunities to people.

Conole and Dyke brought the issue of peripheral participation, which could be a risk caused by technology. However, I would not worry this because students or novices usually start from peripheral participation. Teachers should provide opportunities to encourage students’ deep learning. I like the authors’ bringing up of one issue that it is not the ICT which promotes students’ deep level of reflection, it is how technology being used decides it. That is definitely true. Although ICT tools could provide students an opportunity to display their thoughts, it is teachers’ or peers’ prompts that encourage deep reflections.

At the end of the article, the author pointed out that there’re several open questions that are unsolved. One of the issues is the affordances Conole and Dyke interpreted came out of their particular view of social theory, especially activity theory which believes people should be situated in society. Personally, I think this is the most foundational theory on which this week’s readings based.  

Boyle & Cook:

As a commentary article to Conole and Dyke, Boyle and cook pointed out the concept of affordances conflates the issue of utility, “the action it affords for the user ” with usability, which means the perceptual information that indicates the affordance. The major critique to Conole and Dyke is they conflated affordances with abilities. From my understanding, affordance means features that were embedded in tools and abilities mean how people would take advantage of the features. However, usually, there is a gap between affordances and abilities. This is consistent with what Boyle and Cook pointed out: people need to adapt their behaviors or tune the technology a bit to align their behaviors with the technology, such as the CSCL literature reviewed in the article. Personally, I think this is very important. Even back from the first week reading, I thought that it is not technology’s fault that hinder technology’s facilitating role; it is people’s way of using technology made the hindering factors even worse.

In the article that Cnole and Dyle replied to Boyle & Cook, they pointed explicitly that technology affordance should not be defined as facilitating roles, but also limitations. Their purpose of having the taxonomy is to make the affordances (both facilitating and limitations) explicit to researchers.

Osiurak et al:

I think this is a bit difficult to read. I read this after the commentary articles. I think I should have read this piece first, as it explains theoretical issues in Conole & Dyke and Boyle & Cook.

At the beginning of the article, they were debating the definition of tools and what should be counted as tools. Alternative views of tools have objects that are manipulated, objects that are used to change the physical shape of another object.  In the section of ecological theory of tool use, Osiurak went over the concept of affordances brought up by Gibson, which appears a good explanation of the debate between Conole, Dyke and Boyle, Cook. Gibson suggested affordances of environment means it provides unlimited opportunities for human beings to explore. However, what is different from people to people is how they perceive the affordances of environment and take use of them. Therefore, “affordance is action-referential properties of the environment that may or may not be perceived”.

In the section of limitation of ecological theory, Osiurak proposed another relationship between tools and object exists, which is the dual relationship between objects and tools. Affordance is a “map” between people and the environment (or tools in the environment). However, this perfect map can’t explain the relationship between the objects and tools human could manipulate. This is one limitation of the theory. Osiurak et al pointed out once the goal of activities has been determined, the perception of affordances guides the process of choosing the most appropriate tools to manipulate the objects. Therefore, we could conclude it is the perception of affordance precedes the process of fitting tools with objects. Gibson pointed out that the theory of affordances could be used to describe the relationship between objects and tool. However, Osiurak noted that this is contradictory with the notion of affordance as an action-referential concept. Therefore, the theory of affordances left the question of how human beings decide the degree of mapping between tools and objects open—this provides opportunities for new theory comes in.

The dialectical theory proposed by Osiurak highlighted the goal of activities and selecting tools based on goals. It attributed human’s tool use to their technical reasoning. However, although nonhuman animals could use tools with repeated trial and error, they can’t perceive the underlying laws between which tools are appropriate to use and the affordances of tools. Osiurak pointed out that animals’ tool use is quite context-dependent. The dialectical theory of human tool use is complementary in terms of it combines the affordance theory and human technical reasoning together. Affordance theory explains the relationship between tools and humans’ perception of tools, technical reasoning explains why people choose particular tools for usage.

Straub

All of the three models introduced in the article are based on social cognitive theory which believes human beings learn not only from their own experiences but also from observing others. This sets the theoretical foundations of this article and this week’s readings. 

Thoughts after 0121 Class

I am really impressed by the “what” versus “why” question, which could be a good way to differentiate quantitative research method and qualitative method. Qualitative method asks the why question whereas quantitative question asks the what question. We also discussed this in our small group. We thought quantitative method gave us an overall feeling of the data whereas, qualitative method was used to uncover the question of what was happening. The difference between qualitative and quantitative method also has implications of subjectivity. We talked in class that qualitative researchers need to be explicit about his/her standpoint. Dan pointed out the issue of in qualitative research, researchers are instruments. This highlighted the issue of bias and subjectivity. As research instruments, one needs to know the degree of preciseness of instruments (this is especially true in hard science). Therefore, as researchers would have personal interpretation imposed on the data which inevitably would affect the degree of preciseness.

Technology has been used in the data-collection process. I kept thinking of whether using technology in the process of data collection increases the objectivity of the data or decreases. I was thinking of some log data that was collected automatically by the system. This sounds like increasing the objectivity as it is the system which collects the data. Being unlike researchers’ data collection (e.g., one holds the camera and video recording the classroom), which has researchers’ opinions imposed, log files are created by the system and with a character of comprehensive and exhaustive.

I don’t necessarily remember who brought up the issue that technology would shape our view of data. I am wondering is it because of this, Merriam suggested technology placed a distance between researchers and data?

0119 Reading Reflection on Technology and Qualitative Method

I began my journey of this week reading from Paulus, Lester, and Dempster’s (2014) book.

In the book chapter, the authors pointed out those researchers were quite cautious of reporting the qualitative tools. They framed their reports of the qualitative tools to how they used them but not thinking of the concordances and restrictions.  In the first chapter of the book, the authors talked about the affordances and restrictions of technological tools. This sets the tone of this week reading: studying the affordances and restrictions of technology’s role in qualitative analysis. 

In Paulus, Lester and Britt (2013) piece, they want to examine the relationship between technology and the specific stage of conducting qualitative research and authors’ attitudes towards technology. Being a bit deviant from regular review articles, which were characterized by coding and counting frequencies along the coding scheme, the authors here used predefined categories and mapped the papers with the categories. For example, in the section of how technology was used for transcribing process, they surveyed the literature to show which kind of technologies were used for the transcribing process and mapped these categories with the stud.

There are several places that Paulus et al (2013) talked about ethical issues of using technologies to assist qualitative research. It is one out of the limitations of using technologies. However, they took a position that is more neutral than Merriam’s position. Merriam posited technology as no more effective than word processing tool (P.647). Their major argument were it is researchers who did the analysis (i.e. assigned the codes); what the technology does is to implement these codes and save the labor work.

When I read this article, I was also confused by the notion of technology sets a distance between researchers and data. Merriam suggested that the role of technology was no more advanced than word processor. If that were the case, how could we understand the notion of the distance between researchers and data? Technology should not be blamed; it is the analysis method (i.e. doing coding and counting frequencies without delving into the data). Technology does save our labor work and move our energies to works that need more energies. It is not technology which sets the gap between researchers and data. 

Their piece is interesting to me in terms of what Paulus and her colleague were doing is similar with what I am doing for my daily research work: searching the literature and put corresponding ones to categories. 

Being continuance with the critical position Merriam took in Paulus et al's article, Roberts & Wilson's (2002) piece also focused on the possible negative relationships between technology and qualitative study. At the beginning of the article, the authors made the claim that the purpose of qualitative research is to uncover meanings of discourse. This may be conflict with the way how have computer technology has been employed to assist qualitative analysis, which focused more on content analysis along a coding scheme. They further noted that ICT is designed to count, number and measure things quantitatively. This is in conflict with qualitative research goal, which features with exploring meanings from feelings, emotions and other subtle activities. They suggested that the qualitative data is fuzzy and not appropriate for quantifying them. However, this seems conflicts with the quantifying qualitative data method introduced in Chi’s (1997) article which features with doing and counting of utterances.

I was making connections when I read Coffey, Holbrook and Atkinson's (1996) piece.  At the very beginning of the article, the authors pointed out the instabilities of methods taken ethnography research. They pointed a dual process of destabilization: “taken-for-granted categories and methods of data collection”. However, in contrast to the “dual process of destabilization, there is a tendency that qualitative research tend to construct a consensus on ideal-type of qualitative research method, such as data collection, data storage and analysis.”

 This is so consistent with Roberts & Wilson's work  (2002) which was about the unfitness between technologies and the philosophy of qualitative research. 

  

In the section of exoticism, the authors mentioned the issue of feminism. At the first sight, I was wondering how does this relate to qualitative research? Borrowing the theoretical notion of not to treat women as “voiceless objects“, researchers implicitly pointed out less powerful group of people tended to express their feelings by non-articulated discourse, sometimes from activities. This also pointed back to Roberts and Wilson's piece in terms of the fuzziness of qualitative data. 

In the section of using technology to assist the process of qualitative analysis, Coffey et al specially alerted fellow researchers that qualitative research methodology has a trend of validating their research activities with grounded theory. They further suggested “if you want t do qualitative research using computer, you have to code your data.”This is the point that authors pointed out at the beginning that it was easy to develop take-it-for-granted mode of data handling. Therefore, at the end of the section, the authors reminded researchers that analytical strategies implied by code-and-retrieve procedures are tied to specific inputting requirements of computing software strategies. Researchers cannot alter their analytical methods in order to use computational software.