Squeezing out the good stuff

Yesterday I wrote a post concerning the concept of affordances, and I promised a whole series examining the affordances of digital media - learning technologies. One of the best articles I have read on affordances in digital media has to be the one written by Matt Bower which looked at matching learning tasks to technologies. It's a sensible, no nonsense take on the spectrum of possible digital media affordances, and it provides some simple, clear models of how they relate to each other. Bower shows that affordances - i.e. the perceived attributes or features of the technology - determine the actions that can be performed by the user with that technology. He quotes Donald Norman to clarify this point:

"The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could be possibly used. A chair affords ('is for') support and therefore affords sitting. A chair can also be carried" (Norman, 1988, p. 9).


One of the key affordances of digital media for me anyway, is its educational affordance. That is, all digital media have properties that allow them to be used to learn. That's important to acknowledge. Not all technologies used in education were designed for the purpose of learning. Podcasting for example, was originally designed so that people could listen to music downloaded from the Internet. Yet many schools, colleges and universities have been able to effectively harness podcasting so that its pedagogical value can be squeezed out. Although there was no special 'educational-ness' designed into podcasting, people have perceived its potential to support learning through downloaded audio files that can be sequenced and archived. And some educational podcasting projects have been very successful.


Another example is the mobile phone, which was first designed so that users could communicate at a distance and while on the move, without needing to use a fixed line telephone. Although we are seeing the demise of the telephone box on many street corners in the Western world as a result, and although we are often annoyed in public places by irritating little ring-tones, we are never-the-less able to learn on the move. We have done this by perceiving the affordance, and then creating learning objects that can be accessed through the mobile phone. These affordances go beyond its original design, tapping into the open potential of the web browser each mobile phone comes complete with.


Tomorrow I will explore another affordance of digital media, and try to make sense of it in the context of current e-learning practices.


References
Bower, M. (2008) Affordance analysis: Matching learning tasks with learning technologies. Educational Media International, 45 (1), 3-16.
Norman, D. A. (1988) The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.


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'Squeezing out the good stuff' 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.

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.