Technology Affordances and IT Identity

The study attempts to understand the impact of technology affordances on identifying the self with technology (IT identity). Furthermore, it seeks to understand the role of experiences in mediating the relationship between technology affordances and IT identity. To answer our research questions, we will conduct a cross-sectional survey

Technology Affordances: The Case of Wikipedia

The affordance perspective to technology research aims to offer a definition of technology that bridges between previous positivist and constructivist perspectives. To study technology from an affordance angle, it needs to be defined and extracted. This study aims to develop a better understanding of technology by conceptualizing and dimensionalizing technology affordances. To demonstrate the practical value of our conceptualization, we empirically identify and define six affordances of Wikipedia as a case

Investigation of the technology effects of online travel media on virtual travel experience and behavioral intention

This study investigates technology affordances of online travel media determining ways of presenting pictorial information and creating the spatial structure of a destination: modality and navigability. To examine the impacts of technology affordances on virtual travel experience, a 2 (modality: still pictures versus panoramic pictures) × 2 (navigability: absence versus presence) between-subjects experiment was conducted with 213 participants. This study found significant effects of modality and navigability on affective and cognitive dimensions of virtual travel experience. Scrutinizing the mediating role of virtual travel experience, the findings explain the psychological mechanism of how modality and navigability influence tourists’ behavioral intention

Recomendation systems and crowdsourcing: a good wedding for enabling innovation? Results from technology affordances and costraints theory

Recommendation Systems have come a long way since their first appearance in the e-commerce platforms.Since then, evolved Recommendation Systems have been successfully integrated in social networks. Now its time to test their usability and replicate their success in exciting new areas of web -enabled phenomena. One of these is crowdsourcing. Research in the IS field is investigating the need, benefits and challenges of linking the two phenomena. At the moment, empirical works have only highlighted the need to implement these techniques for tasks assignment in crowdsourcing distributed work platforms and the derived benefits for contributors and firms. We review the variety of the tasks that can be crowdsourced through these platforms and theoretically evaluate the efficiency of using RS to recommend a task in creative crowdsourcing platforms. Adopting a Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory, an emerging perspective in the Information Systems (IS) literature to understand technology use and consequences, we anticipate the tensions that this implementation can generate

Patterns of Capability Building in New Ventures: The Role of Digital Technology Affordances

Technology affordances of social media, mobile technologies, analytics, and cloud computing are used by entrepreneurs to create new ventures and to innovate. New ventures are vulnerable in the early stages of their lifecycles, and so often try to connect to entrepreneurial ecosystems with an ensemble of actors, to gain access to shared pools of resources such as those available in university incubators. This paper examines the use of digital technology affordances to develop important new venture capabilities. We use a case study method and a configurational approach (i.e., fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis) to identify how combinations of technological, organizational, and contextual factors interact in the ideation and development stages of new ventures as they develop various capabilities. In this way, we examine technology-enabled patterns of capability building

Making it Rich and Personal: crafting an institutional personal learning environment

Many of the communities interested in learning and teaching technologies within higher education now accept the view that a conception of personal learning environments provides a the most realistic and workable perspective of learners’ interactions with and use of technology. This view may not be reflected in the behaviour of those parts of a university which normally purchase and deploy technology infrastructure. These departments or services are slow to change because they are typically, and understandably, risk-averse; the more so, because the consequences of expensive decisions about infrastructure will stay with the organisation for many years. Furthermore across the broader (less technically or educationally informed) academic community, the awareness of and familiarity with technologies in support of learning may be varied. In this context, work to innovate the learning environment will require considerable team effort and collective commitment. This paper presents a case study account of institutional processes harnessed to establish a universal personal learning environment fit for the 21st century. The challenges encountered were consequential of our working definition of a learning environment, which went beyond simple implementation. In our experience the requirements became summarised as “its more than a system, it’s a mindset”. As well as deploying technology ‘fit for purpose’ we were seeking to create an environment that could play an integral and catalytic part in the university’s role of enabling transformative education. Our ambitions and aspirations were derived from evidence in the literature. We also drew on evidence of recent and current performance in the university; gauged by institutional benchmarking and an extensive student survey. The paper presents and analyses this qualitative and quantitative data. We provide an account and analysis of our progress to achieve change, the methods we used, problems encountered and the decisions we made on the way

Focused Immersion: When Do Information Technology Affordances Disrupt It?

The rise of the use of Information Technology (IT) in many activities throughout people’s lives has led to questions about the impact on our attention. While most studies in this area have examined the role of task-specific technology, we still know little about the broader role of IT in people’s environments. In this study, we examine how and when exposure to technology affordances, such as having a smartphone at hand, affects focused immersion in a task. Based on theory on construal levels, and confirmed by our study, we posit that higher level, abstract ways of thinking protect against the negative impact of IT affordances on focused immersion. This insight can potentially help individuals tailor their IT environments to their needs for a deeper engagement in their activities. Further, by connecting strands of literature on focused immersion, this work can facilitate the development of a more comprehensive theory of focused immersion

Tomorrow’s World nQuire: young people’s requirements for engaging with inquiry-led, civic engagement technologies

Citizen inquiry describes the learning benefits to people who engage actively in inquiry-led investigations. The Tomorrow’s world nQuire project, a collaboration between The Open University and the BBC in the UK, utilises the citizen inquiry paradigm to design an online platform to support large-scale public experiments, linked to TV or radio programmes. Scaffolding the investigations has been a challenging task, exploiting technology affordances that integrate guidance for inquiry-led activities and mass collaborative participation. The aim of this study is to examine the usability of an early version of the platform and understand, in particular, how young people aged 16 to 18 in particular perceive technologies that support inquiry-led social science investigations. Outcomes revealed that there is a preference by the majority of the young participants to use mobile devices for accessing the platform. This finding emphasises the importance of mobilised learning and mobile-friendly design for engaging teenagers with inquiry-led activities

Delivering Disruption in an Emergent Access Economy: A Case Study of an E-hailing Platform

The growing adoption of platforms such as Uber and Airbnb has contributed to the emergence of an access economy, which has disrupted a number of incumbent industries in the process. In this study, we examine goCatch, one of Australia’s largest e-hailing and ride-sharing multi-sided platforms. From our investigations, we find that the technology affordances of multi-sided digital platforms can help to deliver new commercial services and offerings to consumers of the platform, which enables new forms of consumption and, subsequently, disrupts the incumbent industry. Our findings provide the empirical premise for a model that illustrates the role of technology in enabling consumer recognition, consumer engagement, and consumer transposition in the e-hailing context. For theory, we build on extant literature to identify the forms of motivational affordances leveraged in disruptive platforms and technologies. For practice, we conceptualize the function of technology-enabled gamification as an emergent strategy that one can use to induce consumers to change their behaviors, develop their technical skills and drive innovation that plays a central role in enabling digital disruption. This study also clarifies the relationship between technology affordances and value creation against the backdrop of the emergent access economy