Name: Wong Wing Nam s3827326
I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration.
Blog reflections
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Text 1 – Affordances (word count: 690)
Norman, D 2008, ‘Affordance, conventions and design (Part 2)’, Nielsen Norman Group, viewed on 9 March 2020
In this article, Norman distinguished some of the concepts he mentioned in his book “The Psychology of Everyday Thing”. Principally, the article redefines what he cognized “affordances”. The reason is that the term “affordances” suggested by J.J Gibson(1977, 1979) mean “the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal)” was vague and there is some confusion created by him from his book “The Psychology of Everyday Thing”, thus, Norman rephrased the term to “perceived affordance”. He breaks the article into three sections to explain the concepts accordingly: the conceptual theory, conventions and affordance, the perceived affordances and the constraints and conventions. He suggests there are three major dimensions in understanding how to operate a device, which are conceptual theory, conventions and affordance. Indeed, “affordances” play a different role in physical products than they do in screen-based products. Hence the three dimensions also often obscured with “affordances”, therefore, he raises examples and interpretations of its role and relieves the confusion with affordances accordingly. At last, Norman also includes a summary to conclude the concepts covered in the article.
In fact, some of these concepts are not easy to distinguish. However, with the offer of examples by Norman, it becomes more understandable. For example, he uses ‘touch screen’ to keep the idea concise, showing that when is a convention and when is an affordance. In latter, Norman also identifies the differences between convention and constraints by stating there are three types of behavioural constraints which are physical, logical and cultural. Mainly, cultural constraints are conventions shared by a group of people who practice the same culture. With the example of ‘scroll bar’ as an example, people share the same practice of knowing we need to move the cursor, press down the mouse and drag bar to scroll. In addition, most of the claims and examples Norman raised were from the designer’s perspective, they differentiate the role in each aspect so we can look at the appearance of it and have the clues to let us operate and function it properly. On the other hand, he also suggested that product designers could adopt this theory in their designs, thus to assure everything else consistent with it and can be user-friendly. This could show the article is largely for the designers. Furthermore, it is interesting to see an author make claims towards his previous book due the concepts are distributed unclearly, but obviously the concepts mentioned in the article are clearly delivered and supported with different examples to interpret the ideas. However, it sometimes makes the audience feel confused towards the concept of affordances, as Norman overthrows his past deduce towards affordances and also criticizes some scholars’ proposition. Indeed, Norman only gives a brief explanation of it, which is not enough. Yet, readers need to go through the words again and again and imagine the pictures from the examples to understand the assertion of Norman.
The article by Norman efficiently delivered the concept of affordances in a succinct way, which solved the misunderstanding towards this term. In regards to the course prompt in Instagram’s affordances, it assisted me in understanding what is affordances and fostered me to bring up crucial questions like “how Instagram works?”, “What are the customs of Instagram users?”. However, the information given by the article is not enough, it still needs further investigation with more supplementary materials to sort out the course prompt, as it only can fulfil my fundamental cognition towards the topic. Besides, this article was written in 2008, which is around 10 years ago, so some of the examples may not be applicable in present. For example, users do not have to drag the bar to scroll up and down but simply control it by mouse. This also led me to face difficulties when applying his concept into Instagram as his offered examples are ambitious to imagine (his examples are more applicable in hardware but not software). Moreover, Norman as a designer and engineer who is active in the field of usability engineering and cognitive science, his view towards these concepts would be more persuasive to a student from these fields.
Text 2 – The Network (word count: 683)
Miles, A. 2006, ‘Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning‘, Screen Education (St. Kilda, Vic.), no.43, pp.66-69, viewed on 14 March 2020
This article written by Miles systematically introduced the functions of blogs and its role within education. He breaks the article into different sections to propose how blogs could be beneficial in education and to inspire students in the field of media. In prior to introducing “what is blog”, he mentioned his comprehensive experiences in blogging and the view of he recognises blogging can be used. The ideology of blogging is explored in the following paragraphs, he offers features of blogs and the functions of Content Management System provided in blogging. Then he used the characteristics of the blog to link with “why use a blog” to establish his stance in explaining teaching and learning through blogging. Miles especially emphasises that productive blogging should assert on the thought of post-print literacy rather than the print literacy, also, he argues the time to learn blogging is such as to write a successful article that takes years to develop (p66). This supports how Miles agrees that blogging could let learners acquire more experiences in literacy with the providing of interaction with peers, recording and achievements provided in the blog. Thereby, Miles concludes the article with the teaching strategies and its benefits on learning and to the students’ future career.
Miles provides features of blogging to explain how people could identify blogging with other sorts of platforms, in addition, detailed reasons for adopting blogging as a teaching tool and offering strategies. Moreover, he states his experiences and qualification in this field at the beginning of the article to enhance his credibility and persuasiveness throughout the article. To provide concrete examples in differentiating writing blogs and other sorts of writing channels, he offers that blogging is a web-based publication which would be linked up with the public thereby all the entries are indicated as posts with headings, subheadings, lengths of paragraphs varies. He also mentions that the blog is somehow a journal writing and diaries, yet web-based and to the public. In later paragraphs, he supports his ideas of proposing blogging in teaching along with various logical reasons – encourages reflective and process-based learning, nurturing peer support and collaboration, provides a record of achievement and allows students to participate in contemporary information. With the merits provided, it sufficiently allows people to believe the features of blogging are beneficial to education. He then provides endorsement on teaching strategies to make blogs included in the course curriculum like he proposes writing entries that integrate with the student’s understanding and identification during lectures or workshops. This act could inspire teaching professions to include this education strategy preparation of course and greater extended writing to “network” thus, linking people online. However, the habitation of blogs in 2020 has changed in comparison to the year of publication of this article in 2006, this may be critical when applying this to the current situation. Indeed, most of his ideas are based on his experiences and cognition as a perversion of the results, so it may not be definite.
The discovery of this piece would be relevant to our course prompt in general. As this article was written in a manner that people could apply the ideology to other similar platforms like the use of Instagram, likewise, the functions in a blog can be linked with Instagram or other typical social media platforms like Facebook. Users can use tags, comment and share which provide spaces for people to interact like what Miles mentioned in the article for blogs. Although the article was published in 2006, the features of the blog are more or less the same and the ideas he offers could also be applied to various media platforms that play similar roles. This leads to the affordances of blogs to be wide and apply to Instagram. It indicates the affordances of Instagram are granted based on people’s contribution and arrangement in posts. Therefore, Miles stances provided in the article about blogs cultivated the understanding in practising these ideas not limited in blogs but also other network linked platforms such as Instagram, hence the differences of application in Instagram would show various types of authorizations, publications and distributions.
Text 3 – Social Media (word count: 680)
Hinton, S & Hjorth L 2013, Understanding Social Media, Sage Publications, London 2013, pp. 1-31, viewed on 20 March 2020
This book written by Hinton and Hjorth have generally explored the framework of social media today, within the first two chapters it discovers the origin, evolution and to declare the internet is social. In the latter, it also analyses the control elements within Web 2.0. The first chapter is the introduction that comes up with several daily examples and provides insight for readers that communication is ‘flashes of light’(Hinton & Hjorth 2013, p.3). Hinton and Hjorth also depict connections around the globe as ‘an exquisite decoration’ that connected with ‘orbiting satellite’ (2013, p.3). With the following chapter, it starts the focus on Web 2.0 about the investigation on the web, the key technical features and the relationship with the development of the internet like a business and creative production. Also how Web 2.0 can be empowered and controlled. Therefore, these two chapters were mainly analysing Web 2.0 and its relationship with various subjects.
The authors introduce Web 1.0 and 2.0 assist the audiences to differentiate and identify them, Hinton and Hjorth argue that Web 2.0 is an approach that is much more than the idea that users are important, or communications in markets. Yet, online business and the response to the challenges in a networked society. Therefore, they justify though Web 2.0 is much accessible to users in parallel with Web 1.0, however, it proposed to be more accessible to businessmen and cooperators who are financially beneficial in using the web and take over the control over the market environment. The authors uphold the idea that Web 2.0 is much approachable to users who take it as a tool for business, hence to command with their operating environment to build images of their users. On the other hand, Hinton and Hjorth dispute that the web is also a communication tool through SNSs as mentioned in the introduction of the book, it is not limited to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. It is not a channel only for commercials and market but also for people to connect together effortlessly. Indeed, the authors further explore that social media allows users to create things and develop a voice within society. It fosters information to gather easily and to be recorded. To the extent, the authors argue it provides a platform for users to take over control, in fact, it also compromises people’s privacy. This provides an insight into how the internet has developed a tactic of communication and commercial tool for businesses and organisations to gain users’ information. Most importantly, the authors come up with the conclusion that social media is both controlling and empowering for users to interact in the environment.
The text is useful and greatly beneficial for readers to cognise the influence of social media in the world and how divergent of users exploit it. It allows readers to justify how social media is being used from communication to marketing. However, the authors have placed particular emphasis on the adverse side of the internet, such as suggesting the company’s strategy to understand the interest of the users by tracking their navigational history for further control over their operating environment. With a great proportion of discussing the negative side of social media may cause the illusion to readers, that social media utilises the users. When it comes to the affordances of Instagram, it could easily associate with the distribution of photos and videos are not randomly shown but based on the user’s interest. In terms of business and marketing on Instagram, the article obviously shows an insight that the authorization and publication would be in regard to the data being collected, so as to implement photos or videos that are adjacent to audiences’ interest. Therefore, the text also acknowledges social media like Instagram is being exploited in advertising and marketing to raise a large extent of awareness. To conclude, the authors forecasted the development of social media in 2013 with the state of various negative sides throughout the text, however, it favourably allows audiences nowadays to take it as reference to analyse and evaluate on the affordances and impacts of social media.