Affordances

A tout instant, quoi que nous fassions, nous sommes environnés par des corps qui réduisent l’espace et opposent de la résistance. Que sont ces corps qui saturent notre quotidien et avec lesquels il nous faut constamment négocier l’espace ? Plus radicalement, pourquoi y a-t-il des corps ? Je soutiens dans cet ouvrage que la psychologie et la physique ne disposent plus des moyens de répondre à cette question. La désubstantialisation du réel amorcée par la révolution quantique sape les fondements de l’explication objectiviste de la perception privilégiée par la première, et elle évide de sa portée ontologique le discours de la seconde.
Expliquer pourquoi la réalité se présente sous la forme d’un agencement de corps exige en premier lieu de comprendre le rôle que remplit l’anticipation du possible dans la perception. Dans le toucher comme dans la vision, poser l’existence d’un corps implique d’anticiper les contraintes que ce corps exerce sur notre champ de possibilités pratiques, accréditer de manière présomptive la disponibilité ou l’indisponibilité de certaines possibilités d’action. C’est donc uniquement parce que notre subjectivité donne sens à ce qui est en le référant à ce qui peut être que la réalité macroscopique à laquelle nous introduit la perception consiste en un monde solide.
Pour développer cette idée, l’ouvrage dresse une critique de la conception actualiste du phénomène de corps, qui subordonne celui-ci à l’expérience en acte d’une résistance, et il déconstruit l’approche physicaliste et objectiviste, qui prétend dériver les propriétés des corps que nous percevons des propriétés de structures physiques qui leur seraient antécédentes ontologiquement. Si la sémantique des corps présuppose l’épaisseur du temps humain et une perspective foncièrement pragmatique sur l’environnement, il n’est plus question d’assimiler sans autre forme de procès le corps à une « structure physique », quelle qu’en soit la teneur. Les corps sont un produit de l’activité constructrice de notre subjectivité, et seule une incursion profonde dans les mécanismes et principes qui régissent cette activité pourra permettre d’accéder à leur vérité.

This paper summarizes a doctoral research currently in its early stage. The study explores the extent to which Web 2.0 technologies are affecting the ways PhD students learn to become researchers. The planned study will
firstly survey resources and tools available to and digitally-mediated practices undertaken by the doctoral researchers enrolled in three Italian and one UK universities. Secondly, it will identify, interview and observe
new doctoral ‘e-researchers’, defined as self-directed learners striving to build up disciplinary knowledge, academic literacies and their ‘being scholars’ both in traditional university contexts and in networked digital
environments. The doctoral work is designed with a mainly qualitative approach and aims to highlight descriptive features of individual PhD e-researchers’ learning ecologies. A specific focus will address
contrasting modes of using and interpreting spatial and temporal dimensions of the doctoral experience in formal research training contexts and in self-organised networked practices. It is argued that findings can reveal the extent to which such pioneer doctoral researchers are co-evolving together with the emerging modes of networked scholarship, that are changing research practices. The expected results are also likely to suggest implications for transforming current practices of doctoral pedagogy in university settings.

Individuals can do a broad variety of things with their words and enjoy different degrees of this capacity. What moderates this capacity? And in cases in which this capacity is unjustly disrupted, what is a good explanation for it? These are the questions I address here. I propose that speech capacity, understood as the capacity to do things with your words, is a structural property importantly dependent on individuals’ position in a social structure. My account facilitates a non-individual- istic explanation of cases in which speech capacity is undermined due to speaker’s perceived social identity, e.g. episodes of silencing. Instead of appealing to interlocutors’ implicit bias against speaker’s identity, a structural approach refers to the positions interlocutors occupy in the social structure and the discursive conventions operating upon those positions. I articulate my proposal drawing on the notion of affordances. Each position within a social structure is associated with its own range of speech affordances. Thus, speech capacity is a function of the probability distribution of speech affordances across positions in the structure.

From centuries-old Cartesian dualism to the contemporary obsession with neuroscience, hidden philosophical assumptions about our minds and bodies are exposed when we think about pain and its treatment. A new conceptualisation – the enactive approach – brings together advances on phenomenology and cognitive science and puts the patient and their future at the centre. Peter Stilwell and Sabrina Coninx make the case for a new medical paradigm for pain.

https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-paradigm-to-understand-pain-auid-1998

Considerable investment has been made to bring technology to schools and these investments have indeed resulted in many “success stories”. However there are two significant gaps in educational uses of technology that must be addressed. The first is a usage gap. Compared to how and how much today’s students use technology outside school, in-school technology usage is much less intensive and extensive. The second is an outcome gap. Compared with the outcomes achieved through investment in technology in sectors outside education, the gains in terms reduced costs and increased productivity achieved by schools is significantly smaller. This article discusses the causes of these two gaps and provides suggestions for bridging them by engaging in discussions about effective teaching and committing to technology planning.

Despite the growing interest and supporting evidence for person-centered care (PCC), there is still a fundamental disagreement about what makes healthcare person-centered. In this article, we define PCC as operating with three fundamental conditions: personal, participatory and holistic. To further understand these concepts, we develop a framework based on the theory of affordances, which we apply to the healthcare case of rehabilitation and a concrete experiment on social interactions between persons with cerebral palsy and physio-and occupational therapists. Based on the application of the theory, we argue that in order for healthcare to be considered as PCC, professionals need to adopt a personalistic attitude in their care, defined (at the how-level) in terms of mutual affordances: how the professional and the person of care acknowledges each other as a person in an interaction. In opposition, we define (at the what level) the functionalistic attitude in terms of object affordances, those related to a concrete goal. We show that PCC requires a balance of personalistic and functionalistic attitudes, since this contributes to a participatory and holistic conception of, and interaction with, the person of care.

Multimedia such as animations are increasingly common in science teaching. Existing research overwhelmingly focuses on developing principles for designing multimedia that support cognitive processing of information. This chapter meets an urgent need to foreground teaching and knowledge in order to develop pedagogic principles for teaching multimedia that support learning science. To do so, the chapter extends existing limited uses of the notion of ‘affordance’ to examine how the knowledge practices expressed by multimedia relate to those central to specific classroom tasks.These epistemic affordances are revealed through an innovative form of autonomy analysis that shows how the diverse elements of complex multimedia objects relate to the contents and purposes of specific classroom tasks. In-depth analyses of two contrasting examples of science teaching with animations show the pedagogic work required to integrate such multimedia and how LCT offers a way of getting to grips with these complex objects in real-world contexts.

In this paper, I am looking for the common ground to judge video game's formal qualities, such as its interface, the rule system and game goals, which would include and explain both intentionally and unintentionally subversive games labeled as 'bad' and 'not games'. I start with two cases of games that subvert expectations to the degree when players actively refuse to recognize them as games. Such games have inspired a variety of research and critique, but there is surprisingly little agreement on what makes them "bad" or subversive, as opposed to typical genre-conforming violent games, which are supposed to be subversive or "bad" but rarely produce the same disruptive experience. Relying on existing analysis of subversive and violent games, I apply user-centered, goal-oriented approaches of UX design (Norman, 1998; Cooper, 2007) to games and complement this framework with a new category, 'phantom affordances': perceived formal properties of a game that actively afford an action but do not deliver the expected outcome. This category can be productively applied to describe and design subversions in games.

Our research on the social movement opposing proposed piracy legislation reveals novel societal opportunities and challenges caused by digitization. We summarize literature on the Katz and Lazarsfeld Two-Step Model of Communication and propose a new model of mass communication for the digital age. We develop a digital discourse bias framework comprised of three structural constraints (on authorship, citation, and influence) and three content restrictions (on frames, signatures, and emotion). Our findings paradoxically reveal social media affords emancipation with regard to structural constraints, but is hegemonic with regard to an important content restriction (i.e., frames). Lean social media mitigated structural advantages and exacerbated content problems. These findings suggest that, as with traditional media, some inevitable evils accompany the societal benefits of social media and that mass media is having a detrimental effect on public discourse. Compared to traditional mass media, digital mass media are in some ways emancipatory (i.e., permitting widespread participation in public discourse and surfacing of diverse perspectives) and in other ways hegemonic (i.e., contributing to ideological control by a few).

A obra visa introduzir os Estudos de Plataforma, um campo de estudos que, desde o início da década de 2010, discute as especificidades políticas e materiais das mídias sociais e de outras plataformas online. Datificação, algoritmos, governança e os modelos de negócio das plataformas são algumas das dimensões sintetizadas no livro. De modo didático, o autor apresenta um conjunto de leituras e de experimentações metodológicas conduzidas com um diversificado grupo de colaboradoras(es) no país e no exterior.

Mobile eye-tracking technology provides data that can be linked to user attention during visual perception. The relationship between a fixation and its subsequent saccade has been proposed to identify ambient versus focal visual processing. Short fixation durations followed by long saccades are characteristic of ambient processing. Longer fixation durations followed by shorter saccades suggests focal processing. The objective of this study was to apply a novel parametric scale (i.e., coefficient K) to eye movement data from packaging usability trials of known difficulty to investigate the relationship between fixations, saccades, and cognitive-challenging phases in user-package interactions. A panel of 40 participants (20 females, 20 males) were asked to open a folding carton and extract its contents. Each participant stood behind a counter of a fixed height wearing an ASL Mobile 5 glasses and completed one task in a lab facility. They were instructed to imagine an emergency scenario where all package contents had to be removed as quickly as possible. Half of the participants were randomly assigned a package with a pull tab on the top of the container (i.e., easy task) while the other half tested a package with a press-in mechanism on the bottom of the folding carton (i.e., difficulty task). Coefficients for each trial were calculated using fixation durations and either saccade durations or saccade amplitudes. Two-sample t-tests based on the coefficients K were conducted to compare mean differences across the two tasks. For coefficients K calculated using saccade durations, results revealed a significant difference in mean coefficient K for each type of task (t(27)=2.57, p≤0.05). For coefficients K calculated using saccade amplitudes, results revealed a significant difference in mean coefficient K for each type of task (t(34)=2.72, p≤ 0.01). Moreover, mean coefficients K for the easy task were negative, signalling ambient processing, while mean coefficients K for the difficult task were positive, an indication of focal processing. Gender differences are also reported. Findings have critical implications for understanding user-package interaction problems and support the use of algorithmic processing of eye-tracking data for automatic usability problems detection.

Given the limited adoption of research-based teaching methods at the postsecondary level, research is necessary that examines why faculty choose to teach the way they do. In this article, I draw on insights from research on teacher cognition and naturalistic decision-making research to identify how perceptions of organizational factors influence instructional decision-making. Results indicate that respondents perceive structural and socio-cultural factors as constraining and affording practice by exerting normative pressures on teaching decisions, imposing logistical constraints, and encouraging autonomy. The relationship between these factors and teaching practice was moderated by factors such as status and other individual characteristics.

The acquisition of a new skill usually proceeds through five stages, from novice to expert, with a sixth stage of mastery available for highly motivated performers. In this chapter, we restate the six stages of the Dreyfus Skill Model, paying new attention to the transitions and interrelations between them. While discussing the fifth stage, expertise, we unpack the claim that, "when things are proceeding normally, experts don't solve problems and don't make decisions; they do what normally works" (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1988, pp. 30-31). This leads us to offer an account of the "perspectival deliberation" that arises for experts and masters and that is distinct from the calculative deliberation characteristic of the lower stages of skillfulness.

This chapter draws on cognitive psychology and neuroscience to explain how the cinematic kiss turns the film experience into a sensuous and intimate experience. By analyzing a series of cinematic kissing scenes selected from dramas with British actress Keira Knightley as the main female character, I argue that the spectator’s desire and sense of intimacy are influenced by prereflexive perceptual dynamics and their neural correlates, in particular on the perception of affordance, as psychologist James J. Gibson posited it at the core of his ecological approach to visual perception.

TASTY is a product derived from the major social news and entertainment company Buzzfeed and it has become a product that thrived as alternative to complicated cooking recipes that normally require a vast knowledge of expertise. Thus, ever since Tasty launched around mid 2015 it has expanded its visibility and it has gained over 14 million Facebook followers within months and it easily gets millions of views for every video they post, becoming a truly influential social media marketing campaign. Even though it is predominantly grounded as a Facebook-only food channel it has had an essential influence across other platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, Vine and Instagram.

This paper analyzes the skilled performance of rock climbing through the frame- work of Embodied and Enacted Cognitive Science. It introduces a notion of enactive planning that is part of one mindful activity of ongoing responsiveness to the affor- dances of the wall. The paper takes two distinct planning activities involved in rock climbing—route-reading and visualizing—and clarifies them through the enactivist and ecological concepts of nested affordances, prospecting, recalibrating, marking, and corporeal imaginings, as well as Rylean concept of heeding. The paper shows that an enactive approach to planning can make sense of both the planning done in preparation of the climb, and re-planning done during the mindful performance, without invoking additional cognitive architectures.

In adopting new theoretical advancements within linguistics and ecological psychology, this paper investigates humor from an ecological perspective in naturally occurring social interaction. In doing so, it is claimed that the notions of language as coordination and values-realizing can provide a new understanding of humor as it appears in human interaction. This argument will be unfolded as a rethinking of Wallace Chafe's notion of nonseriousness (Chafe, 2007) that re-conceptualizes Chafe's idea of a 'mental state' of nonseriousness in terms of interactional affordances and values realizing. This perspective is laid out in in-depth analyses of video recordings of two real-life examples from different settings: two siblings playing and a sequence from a couple-therapy session. It is claimed that both examples of interactional humor can be explained by re-conceptualizing humor as a distinct way of being together. Thus, the emergence of humor is enabled by a shift in the coordinative dynamics rather than by a transfer of semantic 'content' from a speaker to a hearer. Finally, humor is investigated as a temporal phenomenon integrating immediate 'here-and-now' environmental features with socio-cultural expectations on a longer timescale. In this way humor is viewed as a particular type of values-realizing activity that constrains our actions, redirects our attention, and thereby enables us to act in a more playful and joyous manner.

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between app affordances and user abilities in second graders' interactions with mathematics virtual manipulative touchscreen tablet apps. The research questions focused on varying manifestations of affordance–ability relationships during children's interactions with mathematics virtual manipulative touchscreen tablet apps. Researchers qualitatively analyzed video recordings and ethograms from clinical interviews of 33 second-grade children. Each 45-min clinical interview involved one child interacting with two sequences of mathematics virtual manipulative touchscreen tablet apps: one sequence focusing on place value concepts and the other sequence focusing on skip counting concepts. Results provided evidence of Moyer-Packenham and Westenskow's (Int J Virtual Pers Learn Environ 4(3):35–50, 2013) five affordance categories of virtual manipulatives. Approach to and degree of affordance access varied depending on a child's corresponding ability, and some children modified their affordance access as their ability changed. Results also indicated that outcomes of accessing an affordance also related to a child's ability. Context also influenced affordance access. These results imply that affordance–ability relationships are multifaceted. Overall, these results imply that is important to consider affordance–ability relationships in relation to mathematics education technology. Abstract and references only; please see journal/DOI for full article. affordance access as part of a continuous affordance–ability relationship that can lead to an array of outcomes depending on a child's corresponding ability. Thus, theoretical and empirical research should continue to explore the intricacies of these affordance–ability relationships. These results also have implications for practice, as those who design and implement educational technology tools should be aware of affordance categories and affordance–ability relationships when developing, choosing, and evaluating these tools and children's interactions with the tools. Importantly, these results indicate to researchers, designers, and implementers of educational technology that attributes of users, tools, and contexts will vary, prompting different mathematical learning experiences by users based on affordance–ability relationships.

Since the birth of autism as a psychiatric category, autistic individuals have been described as preoccupied with the world of objects and detached from the world of subjects, thus marking a distinction between the 'social' and the 'non-social' still prevalent in autism research and diagnostic criteria. The aim of this article is to question this distinction by examining the role of things in autistic forms of social interaction. Drawing on qualitative data from an ongoing qualitative and phenomenological study on social interaction among youth with autism, I argue that material things enjoy a sustaining and facilitating role in autistic social interaction for two reasons: First, by being sensible things open to tactile, auditory, and visual engagement, and second, by being things that incorporate normative practices. This relation between the material and the social in which the latter is mediated by the former, I argue is beneficent to individuals with autism because it exploits a particular relation to materiality in order to consolidate a shaky attunement to the social world. I propose a materially mediated mode of interaction guided by the approaches to perception, embodiment and materiality developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Gibson. This account puts pressure on the phenomenological emphasis on the face-to-face encounter and brings intersubjectivity into view as a many-facetted phenomenon realizable not only through interbodily dynamics, but also through the material landscapes situating social encounters.

This article focuses on WeChat, which remains China’s most iconic mobile application. After offering a short history of WeChat’s development and growth, the next section reviews popular narratives of Tencent’s messaging app--ranging from its role as an exemplar of Chinese innovation to its pioneering embrace of a centralized platform model. I then engage with recent analyses that identify in WeChat traits typical of digital and social infrastructure. [...] If WeChat is indeed becoming (or it has already become) an infrastructure, what kind of infrastructure is it? Which affordances does it provide, and how?

Technical design can produce exclusionary and even discriminatory effects for users. A lack of discriminatory intent is insufficient to avoid discriminatory design, since implicit assumptions about users rarely include all relevant user demographics, and in some cases, designing for all relevant users is actually impossible. To minimize discriminatory effects of technical design, an actively anti-discriminatory design perspective must be adopted. This article provides examples of discriminatory user exclusion, then defining exclusionary design in terms of disaffordances and dysaffordances. Once these definitions are in place, principles of anti-discriminatory design are advanced, drawing upon a method of phenomenological variation employed in the context of standpoint epistemology.

Lists are such a simple and ubiquitous form in our everyday lives that we do not think twice about their form. At the same time, lists abound in literary texts, where they considerably impact our reading experience. In order to come to terms with the special form of the list, and the many functions it can fulfil across both literary and non-literary contexts, the concept of affordance offers a useful starting-point. ›Affordance‹ refers to those aspects of an object or form that it is capable of – its potential functions and uses. Applied to the list, the concept allows us to grasp the list's unique formal status: it is remarkably stable over time and yet profoundly sensitive to historical and social changes as well as adaptable to both practical and literary contexts.

This article focuses on situations and emotional perception.  To this end, I start with the Kuleshov effect wherein identical shots of performers manifest different expressions when cut to different contexts.  However, I conducted experiments with a twist, using Darth Vader and non-primates, and even here expressions varied with contexts.  Building on historically and conceptually linked Gibsonian, Gestalt, phenomenological and pragmatic schools, along with consonant experimental work, I extrapolate these results to defend three interconnected points. First, I argue that while perceiving expression is sometimes about reading minds, it is more squarely about perceiving solicitations or closures for action.  Second, I frame expressions as a subcategory of Gibson’s affordances.  This includes those showing up through context, in turn suggesting Kuleshov-like scenarios are not mere perceptual tricks.  Third, I maintain that situations—with or without other human beings—have action-motivating expressive qualities or what Gestalt theorists called physiognomic characters, following Werner.  These likewise emerge through ecological relations, and are very much like affordances and in the world as much as them.  With resemblance theories, my account agrees that we perceive expression in the world. However, it indicates a broad range of cases in which expression shows up as consequences of overall situations that solicit or close actions, as opposed to mere resemblance between entities and human expressions.

It’s difficult to locate the exact starting point of Postmodern Jukebox, as Scott Bradlee acknowledged in a speech to the members of Oxford Union on the 8th of March 2017. Indeed, whilst the first recorded video on the Postmodern Jukebox YouTube channel features a younger Bradlee playing the jazz standard ‘A Night in Tunisia’ (2009a) on keyboard in his living room, it was not until the second video, ‘Classic 80s Hits… Interpreted for Ragtime Piano’ (2009b), that Bradlee initiated what later came to be Postmodern Jukebox’s ‘unique selling point’: covering mainstream late-twentieth and twenty-first century pop music in various ‘retro’ styles. Postmodern Jukebox went on to expand dramatically in size, progressing from a Bradlee and a singer, to a small band, to a loose collective with rotating guest singers, and finally to a group of freelance musicians, known as the ‘PMJ Family’ which is large enough to sustain multiple concurrent global tours. Yet the immense success of Postmodern Jukebox and their global appeal would be inconceivable without digital technologies: it was through the viral success of videos such as ‘Thrift Shop (Vintage ‘Grandpa Style’ Macklemore Cover)’ (2013) and ‘All About That [Upright] Bass’ (2014a) that Postmodern Jukebox was brought to international attention, and these videos remain the primary way through which their fans are first introduced to and consume their content today.
The following dissertation aims to explore the effects of digital technologies on music consumption patterns and the socialities thereby engendered amongst British fans of Postmodern Jukebox through a digital ethnography of Postmodern Jukebox’s online presences, semi-structured interviews with Postmodern Jukebox fans, and fieldwork at two separate events: a Postmodern Jukebox concert at Hammersmith Apollo, London, and a talk given by Scott Bradlee at the Oxford Union. In doing so, I will establish three key ideas: (1) the consumption of Postmodern Jukebox’s music and the socialities that are there entailed is mediated not only by technologies of the early 2000s, such as Web 2.0 and the subsequent Social Networking Sites, but also specifically digital features such as the collecting of metadata about cultural products, recommendation algorithms which factor in this metadata; (2) whilst this consumption takes place within Madianou & Miller’s (2013) environment of polymedia, listeners not only choose the platform on, device through and format in which they listen to this music based relational technological affordances and socio-cultural perceptions thereof, but may also decide to ‘disuse’ a given platform based on negative socio-cultural perceptions; and (3) the varying modes or genres of consumption within this environment of polymedia, whilst all modes of ‘fandom’, result in distinct, yet overlapping and concurrent socialities.

Seals have a powerful and peculiar connection with people. That they serve as signifiers of social
identity, symbols of status and power, has been well established and extensively discussed. The
association of the seal and the human body has also been investigated, but there are dimensions
of this corporeal relationship that demand further consideration and problematization. My aim
is to interrogate the unique dynamism of glyptic objects, both seals and seal impressions, as
they participate in social actions with and without humans. The dynamism of these material
things – their distinctive juxtapositions and movements, potentials for physical engagement
and separation, their interactive surfaces, the intimacy of their involvement with human flesh,
and their decisive abandonments of it – gives rise to truly vibrant material engagements with
persons. These ideas and their implications are examined through the corpus of Bronze Age
Cretan glyptic and ultimately, my discussion closes with a case study drawn from this field,
specifically concerning seals and seal impressions representing lions. Working through this lens
offers contextualized insight into the prismatic ways that seals and seal impressions contribute
to sociocultural experience – practically, poetically, presently, and absently.

This study investigates the design and use of sensory gardens in two special schools by evaluating their functional zones and how they are utilized, especially by children with special educational needs, and the staff who care for them. Preliminary site studies were undertaken in fourteen sensory gardens around the UK, followed by more detailed data collection at two case-study sites. The research aim was to find out the behaviour settings and issues that are common in sensory gardens. The research data collection included in-depth interviews, observation and behaviour mapping, which was used in conjunction with affordance theory. Drawing on Moore and Cosco’s methodology and approach (2007) in relation to inclusive parks, the findings from the data analysis discuss the researcher’s main findings, based on the two case-study sensory gardens. There are two main findings: Firstly, the layout of the circulation network enables user behaviour and use of area. Continuous pathways that link the sensory garden to the site context, with easy access to the functional behaviour settings that are placed along it, have the highest number of users. Secondly, users spent a longer time in zones where sensory, rather than aesthetic value, were emphasised. These main findings have been translated by the researcher into a subset of design recommendations that will be applicable across the majority of sensory gardens, and will assist landscape architects when they are designing sensory gardens in the future.

This study uses various conceptual definitions of control as an analytical lens to explore the Netflix platform. We experiment with various questions of control to examine how control is enacted on Netflix, how it is embedded in different interface elements, and how it influences our experiences with and through the platform. Our analysis highlights how control on Netflix is never situated within a single entity. Instead, it is distributed and continuously reproduced in the process of interaction between different human and nonhuman entities within the sociotechnical Netflix experience. Ultimately, this study champions the idea of control as a sensemaking device, which can be used to analyze complex interaction processes in heavily-mediated environments, allowing us to continue past the now typical stopping point of saying infrastructures are simply entangled. It is a particular thread in the tangle we can pull on, to examine what’s going on, rhetorically or ideologically, within or because of the routines created through our everyday uses of platforms.

official citation (please use :)
Markham, A. N., Stavrova, S., & Schlüter, M. (2020). Netflix, imagined affordances, and the illusion of control. In Plothe, T., & Buck, A. (Eds.). Netflix at the Nexus: Content, Practice, and Production in the Age of Streaming Television (pp. 29-46). London: Peter Lang.

My main objective in this article will be to compare Heidegger's description of the way we perceive our environment in everyday coping -- which is based on the concept of equipment (Zeug) -- and James Gibson's theory of affordance perception. More precisely, I will discuss whether equipment and affordance can be equated. In contrast to some interpretations, I will defend that they cannot: equipment and affordances refer to different ontological kinds and the perceptual or cognitive processes that are implied in each case have nothing in common. In addition, I will defend that distinguishing equipment and affordances is a key step towards a more comprehensive account of the way we perceive and deal with the possibilities offered by our environment, and that Heidegger's and Gibson's accounts, far from being mutually exclusive, complement each other. Some work has however to be done in order to articulate them in a coherent theoretical framework.

This work presents an overview of the contemporary information and communication technologies and their adequate application in all four aspects: information, environment, communication and assessment. Examples for this application are proposed for foreign language learning and learning in a foreign language. The examples highlight the different usage in different contexts (high- and low-technology ones, various subjects) and support the informed choice of an appropriate technology for a particular context. (in Bulgarian)
Key words: technology affordances for language learning; e-learning; e-activity design; material design

Initially published in 2013, as chapter of Compendium 1, Good Practices, Project BG051PO001-3.3.06 - 0045, available at http://su.acadlit.uni-sofia.bg/docs/GoodPractices.pdf

The phenomenon of hate speech has become a predominant component of public debate and a point of great interest in academic research. Plenty of studies investigating the various expressions of hate speech, including online hate speech, have been conducted. Despite the efforts made, however, the outlines of this phenomenon remain extremely uncertain. In fact, limitations in the intention to reduce hate speech to a purely legal approach is emerging. Even though the latter was originally the dominant approach, it appears to be inadequate for capturing a fluid and ever-changing phenomenon such as the hate speech today. Despite the similarities with offline hatred, online hatred has widened to include the most diverse expressions, messages, and hostility practices, which can be either organized or individual, and often implicit. All these features proper of the online hate speech make it difficult to establish, according to the specific circumstances, whether these are forms openly aimed at inciting hatred and violence against target groups likely to harm victims. Nonetheless, distinguishing the different roles of the actors involved into the spread of hate speech (e.g. perpetrators of online speech, more or less aware spreaders of hate, victims) can be a source of uncertainty. Building on this foundation, the article aims to investigate hate speech of today’s world through a multidimensional framework fit into the context of hybrid media. Moving from Lasswell (1948)’s Communication Model, this contribution illustrates the importance of observing all the dimensions involved in hate speech, including the communicator, the message, the receiver, considering as well the digital media’s context and the related specific properties, and the consequences arising from the interaction between the different dimensions. The idea behind this proposal is that in order to understand both mechanisms and hallmarks of ordinary online hate practices, it is necessary to move away from specific and fragmented approaches. These, indeed, (selectively) analyse specific portions of the phenomenon while losing sight of other dimensions’ roles and their action and feedback relations. The transformative nature of hate speech requires the adoption of an innovative approach, which cannot be limited to the compilation of a list of examples and cases to be banned. On the contrary, it should aim for tuning in to cultural and digital practices used by users in the production of hate speech. Because, if it is true that online hate does not differ from hate tout court, it is also true that progressive communicative shifts might occur and lead to the transformation of forms of discrimination into something apparently harmless such as “just funny stuff”.

In order to define instrumentation in the context of mathematics education, it is necessary to define instruments: at this stage of this article we do not differentiate between instruments and artifacts, i.e. regard them as things that are created and used by humans to help, assist, support, enlarge, empower their activity. Instrumentation is the action to give someone an instrument, or the action by which someone acquires an instrument, in order to perform a given activity. The notion of instrumentation is part of a network of concepts; we will focus here on the main dialectical relationships between them.

Schizophrenia and psychosis are associated with wide-ranging phenomenological disturbances. These, it is often said, involve 'aberrant salience'. Others have sought to account for the relevant phenomenology in terms of 'affordance'. We argue that both approaches suffer from the same shortcoming. There are many distinctions to be drawn between different kinds and different aspects of salience, some or all of which might prove clinically relevant. Consequently, terms such as 'salience dysregulation' and 'aberrant salience' lack the required discriminatory power. They should serve only as a starting point for the task of understanding anomalous experience in psychiatric illness and relating it to neuroscience. We further argue that recent appeals to experiences of 'affordance' fall short in much the same ways. Better, we suggest, to acknowledge the many subtly but importantly different ways in which human experience is permeated by a sense of the possible than to mask this complexity and diversity by settling for concepts that are insufficiently discerning. 1. Experiencing Aberrant Salience This chapter discusses whether and to what extent the concepts 'salience' and 'affordance' can assist us in understanding anomalous experience in psychiatric illness. First of all, we ask whether types of experience associated with schizophrenia (and potentially other diagnoses as well) are adequately accommodated by appeals to 'salience dysregulation' or 'aberrant salience'. We argue that the concept of 'salience' is insufficiently discriminating and therefore fails to do the required work. We go on to ask whether these and other wide-ranging phenomenological disturbances might be better conceptualized in terms of altered 'affordance'. We show that the same problem arises here. In addressing the nature of salience dysregulation, we focus on the influential and ambitious account developed by Shitij Kapur and colleagues, which seeks to integrate phenomenology, neurobiology, and pharmacology (Kapur, 2003; Kapur, Mizrahi, and Li, 2005). However, most of our points apply to discussions of salience dysregulation more generally. Kapur's account is concerned with aberrant salience in the early stages of schizophrenia and how