Week 11; Assignment 1- Article Summary

The article Evaluating Pedagogical Affordances of Media Sharing Web 2.0 Technologies was a fascinating one. It lends a lot of insight as to how web 2.0 technologies (i.e. Voicethread) can be evaluated for its pedagogical value. In this case study, instead of focusing on specific aspects of the technology, the experimenters sought to gauge the affordances and the uses of the technology for educators. They used the DIAL-e framework to do so. This is a tool in which academics have sought to harness web tools and digital artifacts to engage student learning.
The authors were seeking to construct an online module based on the use of web 2.0 technologies. In order to do so, they had specific requirements. The wanted a tool where there can be comments and feedback from students and teachers around pieces of media, not just text. Voicethread was the perfect tool for that. It’s designed specifically for an educational audience. It allows the presentation to be created around the media and it’s accessible from all over.
Besides for the ease of use and convenience, there are pedagogical affordances as well. These include connectivity and social rapport, collaborative information discovery and sharing, content creation, and knowledge and information aggregation and content modification. Affordances are “the activity and the practices that the function of a technology enables the user to perform.” (Refer to table 1 for a detailed list of the affordances.) However, the DIAL-e framework shows a different list of affordances based on student engagement, not the content of the technology. These affordances include, posting a clip, shard writing/speaking, experimenting, predict, observe, and evaluate design, and represent previous media.

In conclusion, the DIAL-e framework can assist educators to identify which affordances have value in which contexts. This can be a valuable tool to help teachers gauge which web 2.0 tools would be most effective and engaging for students.

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