Françoise Blin
snocchi
Catherine Jeanneau
Cathy Fowley
Sylvie Thouësny
linlinsong
llana82and here I am…
Posted by llana82 on 15/06/2010
Dear fellow researchers, my name is Svetlana, and I apologise for joining this blog later than anyone else. I come from (a country far far away) Belarus and I am a native Russian speaker. As it happened with some of you, my job is taking over most of my time and it is difficult to concentrate on my final piece of work, which is due by the end of August this year. I am very interested in online communities formed on the social networking sites, as well as intercultural communication. Thanks to Françoise, I am hoping to put up together a project on “Evaluating intercultural affordances of social networks: the case of intercultural online communities in Facebook”. It is only a dissertation for Master’s, but essentially a solid introduction to research and an extremely valuable piece of work for my job at Facebook.
I would appreciate your comments/recommendations and any tips that you have to share and will write more about my area of research in the next few days. Time to go to bed now! 
snocchi said
hello Svetlana
I am also interested in affordances, only in Virtual Worlds such as SL … I must admit I haven’t found a lot of interesting reading on the subject, as the term ‘affordances’ seem to be used extensively but never in a ‘scientific’ way. Could you maybe recommend an article on the matter?
your research sounds really interesting
Svetlana said
Hey Susanna,
Thanks for your feedback and apologies for the late response. I agree with you that it’s difficult to find any specific literature on affordances related to the Virtual worlds. I have listed some articles below which might help you with your research, especially Norman and Wellman, who have done a lot of research in this field. Hope this helps!:-)
Burden, K., Atkinson, S. (2008)“Evaluating pedagogical affordances of media sharing Web 2.0 technologies: A case study” Centre for Educational Studies The University of Hull.
Norman, D. (1999). “Affordance, conventions and design.” Interactions, 6 (3)
Oshlyansky L., Thimbleby H., Cairnes (2004) “Breaking Affordance: Culture as Context” UCLIC, UCL Interaction Centre.
Ruhleder, K. (2005) “Understanding on-line community: the affordances of virtual space”, Information Research, Vol. 7 No. 3
Wellman, B., Quan-Haase, A., Boase, J., Chen, W. (2003). “The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8 (3).
Wellman, B., Hogan, B. (2004). “The Immanent Internet.” in J. McKay Netting Citizens Scotland: University of St. Andrews Press, 2004.
Françoise Blin said
Thanks, Svetlana. This is very useful.
There is also a very interesting blog post that may be of interest (as well as other posts on the same blog): http://tihane.wordpress.com/2007/06/23/affordance-theory-in-games-and-simulations/
kaipata said
Hi Svetlana, do you have your thesis text or articles, it sounds really interesting..intercultural affordances.
Thanx
Kai
Françoise Blin said
Hi Kai,
I have been reading your blog with great interest, and I am returning your question to Svetlana to you… Do you have any publication (in English) on activity theory, affordances, and mediation? I am in the process of co-writing a paper on computer supported collaborative writing in L2 (Second Language), and I would love to read more about your work and to cite you.
Françoise
Françoise
kaipata said
I have been thinking and using affordances quite a lot last 2 years. Perhaps i have some papers that might be interesting. Would you like to keep contact on my email kpata@tlu.ee because i don’t look so much in different blog places to reply comments.
Do you use some dropbox or other where i could share some papers with you that i have downloaded?
And sure, some of my papers are online somewhere too, i will send a link at email, ok?
kaipata said
And i have taken a diagonal look at your phd thesis. What i think is we share quite a lot the topics around which we build research.
How i understand – activity theory is good in emphasizing the elements of the activity system mediators. And the activity system is practically moving from one configuration to another, being always tied and untied with different configurations of mediators. Engeström and associates have called such consequent activity systems that are tied and untied “knotworking”.
So in every event some knots are tied to each other and certain mediators are activated. But in really only those mediators are activated that are perceived as affording this mediating possibility for the actors.
On my opinion, we can interpret whole activity system at one time moment as the affordances that certain involved actors perceive in this time moment in the certain event.
And the affordances are certainly not stabile, but depend on the culture, on the “objects” that the actors want to arrive, their previous experiences and their “perspectives” of seeing some mediators important and others less important.
I have somewhere suggested that to write down an affordance as a rule, you can take all t elements from the activity system as the components of the affordance. Some thing as this:
http://tihane.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/affordances040407.jpg