3 Affordances
Introduction
The concept of affordances is the first one that we’ve tried to cover as part of this course. I chose the concept of affordances because it is not only about the tech, or the thing, but is fundamentally about the relationship between that technology and the person that is using it.
Why is this concept important?
Many of the mistakes I have made in integrating or dealing with technology in the classroom has been about not considering ALL of the affordances of a given tool. On the surface, a given tool might accomplish a simple task in a way that saves you time, is more ‘engaging’ to students or provides more means of collaboration than your previous approach. Many of these tools are VERY easy to start using, and issues like student data security or the ways in which the tool does the critical thinking work for the student aren’t immediately apparent. When those tools are free (or free of financial cost) we often don’t take the time to do the due diligence that might get done if we had to justify using budget money to pay for the tool. Thinking of each tool and all of its possible relations between a user and the tool is essential to doing the work ethically and effectively.
Take ‘search’
Having the ability to search the internet to find documents is an amazing time saver. There are too many affordances here to speak of, but I’ll just highlight a few
- It provides results in accordance to the way a person frames the question. “find me good ways to teach students learning styles” is going to self-select through the literature and return positive articles on learning styles. This does not happen in a card catalogue in a paper library – you would search for learning styles and then go through the literature from there. Paper libraries are not sorted by positive and negative framing. The ‘extra help’ that you are getting from the search being sensitive to your search string also adds your biases to the responses.
- It allows you to search by keywords in a document. In a pre-digital search world, you had to go through many documents, skim through them, sort them yourself and then choose the pieces that you wanted for the work you are doing. Now you can search for a specific term and then search the digital document for the exact term. No need to read the whole article or to read through articles you don’t ‘need’.
In both these cases the academic research process is wholly changed by just two of the affordances of digital search. In the first case, bias can sneak in in a way that it could never have before. In the second case, we no longer need to read the references we are citing in order to use them in our papers, thus weakening the value of writing an essay.
A five minute video introduction
I like this video because it focuses on the ways in which the affordances change not only by the thing that you choose to use, but it focuses on how the affordances can change by who is using it and in which circumstances.