I see on my stats that this article is starting to get a lot of hits. This is part of a work in progress. My thoughts on affordances are evolving as I continue to explore the topic. A couple of things are slightly outdated in this article and need to be updated. I won’t change this article because it is and always will be representative of the evolution of my thinking. Instead, I’ve created an addendum for further reading here. There are two things that I address there:
1. The persistence of affordances. I say here that an affordance exists as long as it is perceived. This is incorrect. If an affordance exists, it always exists.
2. Norman’s and Gibson’s versions of affordances are two distinct concepts that, confusingly, go by the same name.
People working in education are increasingly being urged to think ahead and consider how emerging and future technologies will affect education to better align educational practice, goals and policy with ongoing technological development. It should come as no surprise that I agree. In fact, it’s what I do. But, how do we do this when the future is always at least a step or two ahead of us? It’s certainly no simple task, but what I think it comes down to, essentially, is affordances. That is, we need to consider what the affordances of projected technological developments will be in, and beyond, educational environments.
Imagine a country that has a highly developed culture: poetry, philosophy, science, mathematics, but nobody has yet learned to write; it just hadn’t occurred to them to have pencil and paper or even to write with sticks in the sand. One day somebody develops the idea of written language and the pencil and paper are invented. Very quickly this thing, which becomes known as information and communication technology, ICT for short, is picked up by scientists and by world traders. It has a big impact in those areas, and after awhile somebody wonders why we don’t introduce this into our schools. These being cautious people, they decide that it is too risky to give every child one of these new technologies so they put one pencil in every classroom. ‘If that produces good results’, they thought, ‘we’ll maybe produce two pencils in the classroom’, and so on.
