Facebook Affordances and Instructional Engineering for Higher Learning
This instructional engineering research aims to promote affordance, in environmental conditions, of educational technology exemplified by the Facebook (FB) network in situ. Through quantitative and qualitative data, we observe differences between groups of students that account for variability of sociocultural affordances (allocentric, egocentric, deontic, collective). The prescribed teaching scenario influences the potential for perceived action as part of a situational dynamic and an acculturation process that depends, in part, on the students’ antecedent relationship to the tool. More generally, we observe that FB’s sociocultural affability involves the use of additional communication tools (SMS, email, Google Drive, WhatsApp) that wasn’t predefined by the prescribed teaching scenario. Therefore, any designer of an educational scenario with FB must position it as a link in a larger technical and sociocultural ecosystem according to two criteria: they must formalize the meaning of the communication tool (FB) in relation to the tasks to be performed; and they must consider that this meaning will be the focus of the acculturation process by allowing students to make wider use of other situational tools in their network communications.