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
Whilst I agree I also think there is a strong motivational rationale in terms of affordances. Some research (Zhang, 2008, p. 145) suggests that it is important to look at the motivational approach to ICT use as this can address questions such as “Why do people initiate, continue, stop, or avoid using ICT?” “Why do ICT use behaviours vary? This has real relevance in terms of understanding why teachers may choose to use technology in their classrooms and why they may not.
ReplyDeleteReference List
Zhang, P. (2008). Motivational Affordances: Reasons for ICT design and use. Communications of the ACM: technical opinion, 145-147.