Therese Örnberg Berglund on affordances, conventions and feedback

Therese raises interesting points about how the affordances of a communicative environment affect both the social conventions and communicative actions. Her data comes from two sessions in the multimodal platform ""Flashmeeting" where only one participant can speak and has to line up fo a turn. The turn taking is thus very much affected by this broadcasting feature of the system. Oral feedback is also difficult to give so multimodal ways of giving feedback are taken into use (smileys, chat, etc.). But as her results show, the multimodal aspect of the environment doesn't automatically mean more equal participation among the students.