Emotionality, Experientiality and Sensationality in Network-Based Mobile Education: Looking into the Potential of Affordances

This article aims to analyse the significance of experientiality, emotionality and sensationality in network-based mobile education (NBME). It also looks closely into these concepts as potential affordances in the teaching–studying–learning (TSL) processes. In our previous article (Lehtonen, Hyvönen & Ruokamo, to appear), we demonstrated, on the basis of a theoretical analysis and empirical data, that emotional processes are crucial for studying and learning and should thus be taken into serious account in NBME as well. Emotional factors have a strong impact on the ways one teaches, studies and learns, and on the issue whether one remembers what was taught, studied and supposedly learned. We examined NBE group dynamics in network-based education from the viewpoint of shared emotional states and the NBE conveyance of emotions. The ability to empathise, entering into another person’s role, and emotional reciprocity are essential factors generating a shared mutual emotional state (Chayko, 2002). Emotional, study-related situations were also analysed from the perspective of one’s cognitive and emotional load as well as via situational anxiety and situational pleasure.

‘Experiential’ usually pertains to experience or personal observation, instead of obtained from reasoning. In this sense, experiential always refers to a personal reality as seen by individuals. In our context, experientiality is enriched with emotions, so as to imply strong, personally-coloured feelings, even sensations. By ‘emotional’ we mean mental activity comparable with perception, thinking, language and learning, which also produces feelings. In this paper, we argue that it is essential to examine experientiality and emotionality related to part of network-based mobile education and as dormant affordances vis-à-vis TSL processes. An affordance is a property of an object, or a feature of the immediate environment, that indicates how that object or feature can be interfaced with (Gibson 1966; 1979). We firmly argue that these affordances can and should be made dominant in a way that fully benefits a human being’s potentiality as a committed, self-directed individual. We also look into how expressing emotions and feelings can be beneficially incorporated as part of an individual’s teaching–studying–learning processes.

Emotions represent an individual-level system that provides us with valuable information about the state of our own bodies and the relationship of ourselves and our bodies with ongoing activity (Siegel 1999; Simonov 1981), such as studying. We always assess, in all activity, our knowledge and acts also emotionally, even though we do not always notice it.