Employing a framework to examine the “Niche” for mobile-assisted seamless learning from an ecological perspective

Abstract

Despite the fast development of digital technologies and the booming of seamless learning pedagogical practices, mobile-assisted seamless learning generally happens only in specific and defined learning episodes leveraged by a uniform type of mobile devices. How school students use their own devices to support their seamless learning and what affordances of the mobile devices students would like to use for supporting their seamless learning have rarely been discussed and explored. This chapter, from an ecological perspective, discusses how seamless learning happens using the concepts of affordance network (functionally bound possibilities in an environment), effectivity sets (the attunement and employment of affordance network), and “niches” (sets of affordances or experiences), and develops a framework to examine the “niche” for seamless learning. Implications of the framework are explored. A seamless inquiry into understanding “anatomy of fish” is cited as an example to elaborate the framework.