Can we afford to ignore learner perceptions?

When the psychologist James J. Gibson first published his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979, he was probably unaware of the far reaching consequences of his proposals. In the book Gibson proposed his top-down model of perception, and developed the idea of affordances which he had earlier proposed in an article in 1977 entitled 'Theory of Affordances'. The Wikipedia entry on affordances states:

He [Gibson] defined affordances as all "action possibilities" latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual's ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities. For instance, a set of steps which rises four feet high does not afford the act of climbing if the actor is a crawling infant. Gibson's is the prevalent definition in cognitive psychology.

There are clear implications for affordance theory in the design of digital learning environments, and as Donald Norman has argued, designers need to study people, 'to take their needs and interests into account.' Far too often, (and here I think in particular about the disasterous, constricting nature and abysmal navigation tools of some institutional Virtual Learning Environments - see my Two fingered salute post) the design of learning technologies and environments tend to reflect the needs and aspirations of the designers and the company they work for than the needs of the end user. I addressed some of the issues of design flexibility in Angels in the architecture on this blog a few days ago, and want to continue this trope for the next few blog posts. We cannot afford to ignore learner needs. We need to create learning enviroments (and tools) that reflect what they need. Therefore, we must research how students perceive their environments, and design accordingly. Over the next few days therefore, I'm going to examine some of the affordances of learning technologies and attempt to evaluate them from the perspective of the individual (but socially connected) learner.

References

Gibson, J.J. (1977) The Theory of Affordances (pp. 67-82). In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.) Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Norman, D. (1998) The Design of Everyday Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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'Can we afford to ignore learner perceptions?' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.