Affordance

Affordance

After reading both Bower(2008) and  Morgan, Butler and Power, M. (2007) both of which are text devoted more to evaluating or showing examples of evaluating affordances of various technologies I have come to the conclusion that in an ICT context affordance simply means capabilities or services offered by a piece of technology.
Hadfield and Jopling (2014) describe the history of the term affordance, how it passed first from a term describing the natural world through to HCI and finally to ICT (along with many other fields).

Hadfield, M., & Jopling, M. (2014). The development of an implementation model for ICT in education: an example of the interaction of affordances and multimodality. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 51(6), 607–617. http://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2014.924747

Bower, M. (2008). Affordance analysis—matching learning tasks with learning technologies. Educational Media International, 45, 1, 3–15.

Morgan, M., Butler, M. & Power, M. (2007). Evaluating ICT in education: A comparison of the affordances of the iPod, DS and Wii. In ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Proceedings ascilite Singapore 2007. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/singapore07/procs/morgan.pdf

TPACK and ICT

Reccently on the ESC407 general discussion forum Chris Condy a fellow prospective ICT teacher posted the following;
"I am currently looking over the TPACK stuff and finding it really difficult to break a line between technology an content, as the subject I will be teaching is IT. "

On the same thread Zana Cefai responded with a pretty good article TPCK: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE 'T' IS ALSO THE 'C'? (Gill, 2012).

Both Gill (2012) and Chris observe that for an ICT teacher there is a lot of intersection between the T and C parts of the conventional understanding of TPACK initially defined by Mishra and Koehler (2006). In fact when teaching ICT it can be impossible to separate C and T.

Chris claims that the conclusion from Gill (2012) was that there needs to be a new ICT-TPACK. I am not so sure I agree with this. Gill (2012) does observes that Angeli and Valanides (2009) conclude that there needs to be a separation from other technologies, however, Gill (2012) goes on to include the point from Shuleman (1986) that the beauty of the TPACK model is its inclusiveness.

One thing is certain, Gill (2012) agrees that for ICT teachers there is a strong link between the T and the C.

All of this is very interesting to me because last semester I failed ESC407 and on reflection I believe one of the problems I have had coming to terms with for this subject ( and in particular assignment 2) is the tight coupling of T and C for ICT teachers. 

Also interesting to note is that Roblyer and Doering (p68, 2014) try to redesign the TPCK diagram with a TECH-PACK version that tries to include the added emphasis that is being placed on technology in the classroom. I have enough trouble getting my head around the standard TPCK diagram so the TECH-PACK version from Roblyer and Doering feels  very unweildy.

References

Gill, L. (2012). TPCK: What happens when the “T” is also the “C”? (p. 88). Presented at the Biennial International Technology Education Research Conference, Surfers Paradice: Griffith University. Retrieved from http://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/514768/2012-TERC-Volume-1-of-2.pdf#page=96

Angeli, C.& Valanides, N.(2009).Epistemological and methodological issues for the conceptualization, development, and assessment of ICT–TPCK: Advances intechnological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK).Computers and Education ,52, 154-168.

Roblyer, M., & Doering, A. (2014). Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching: International Edition, 6th Edition, Pearson.