On Affordances

Note from Bill: great talk about affordances at yesterday's meeting! Here's a post I wrote about affordances last year that might be helpful!

Affordances are Relationships
Gibson's concept of "affordances" was introduced to provide an ecological view of interaction among living things and objects in the natural world. Taken up by Norman in The Design of Everyday Things, the concept has become very useful for user experience designers and usability specialists. But Norman, as some have pointed out, focused more on the way affordances map to features of objects - he was talking about things, after all, and their design. Gibson's development of the term clearly indicates that an affordance is not a feature of a thing so much as a relationship between things and an organism. Derek at Earth Wide Moth does a nice job summarizing Gibson.

I like to think of affordances as an accounting of what kinds of interactions are a)possible and b)likely given the known constraints of the whole system (organism, thing, environment). Norman is especially lucid when talking about what interactions are likely, concerned as he is with effective design. The less obvious an affordance, the less likely a possible interaction will occur. Much of Norman's design advice is about making affordances visible and understandable so as to reveal the range of possible interactions between a person and a particular object. Sometimes "visible" and "understandble" clash and so one of them has to go, but I won't go into that too much here.

Affordances and Learning
For our purposes in Teaching with Technology, the concept of affordance is useful because it helps teachers to design and stage learning situations. This typically involves trying to create the conditions favorable for certain kinds of interactions to happen among students, among students and course materials like readings, etc. It is helpful, then, to discuss in concrete terms how we understand those learning situations to include affordances for learning.

Used by permission of Flickr user Dru Bloomfield

Gibson likes to use the suffix "-ability' to indicate affordances, appending it to a verb that represents a shared, goal-oriented action in a given environment. For example, if we are talking about a primary grades classroom where our learning goals include helping students to become comfortable listening to their peers' views, we might choose a room with good line of sight (see-ability) to allow everyone to engage one another in spontaneous ways as the discussion unfolds. We also likely want a quiet space. Carpeting and a low ceiling provide good hear-ability. Otherwise, despite an engaging topic and an enthusiastic group of children, our activity might fail because the physical space simply doesn't afford making interpersonal connections the way we had hoped might happen.

We can also talk about negative consequences of affordances, again as a kind of relationship that exists among organisms, things, and the environment they share. Consider the way cell phones with on-board memory have contact lists that allow you to call a friend by selecting a name from a list rather than dialing a number. This is great as long as you have *your* phone. If we remove that object from your immediate environment, though, you may not be able to remember a close friends' number required to place a call on a land-line phone.

A Blog Prompt: Talk About Affordances in Your Teaching Practice
What do some of your favorite technologies employed in the classroom afford? What are the positive outcomes of those affordances for achieving learning goals you or others have? What are some negative or potentially negative outcomes?

This is one of the blog prompts I'll ask the #AL881 folks to consider during our in-residence week. We'll do a detailed analysis during that week that should allow you to work from a solid rationale for selecting a mix of technologies when you design instructional experiences.