Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

7.2. General Affordances of Social Media

The concept of ‘affordances’ is frequently used in discussions of social media. McLoughlin & Lee (2011) identify the following ‘affordances’ associated with social media (although they use the term web 2.0) in general:

• Connectivity and social rapport
• Collaborative information discovery and sharing
• Content creation
• Knowledge and information aggregation and content modification

However, we need to specify more directly the unique pedagogical characteristics of social media.