Affordances and The Ecological Turn

The important point about affordances is simply that the term ‘affordances’ (which is based on Gibson) gives us a framework to analyse the interaction between the learner and the resources they interact with (people, materials, media), as a ‘micro-ecology’.  These micro-ecologies in turn interact with larger social, cultural and professional ecologies (or ‘discourses’, a la Foucault).  Put all this together, and you have a fairly comprehensive framework for analysing the ongoing dynamic of the way in which the learner creates, manages and presents their own identity/identities.  There is a full paper available on request on this topic, and the Abstract and Conclusion might provide some idea as to what it is all about…  

Abstract

New media and new uses of media in teaching and learning inevitably develop into new practices.  So we need to find new words, concepts and theories to describe and analyse them.  The notion of ‘affordances’ has been borrowed from evolutionary psychology, and many authors have used it to engage with new practices involving new media.  The result has been interesting but somewhat unsystematic.  This  ‘borrowing’ is part of an increasing trend to work across disciplines, particularly disciplines in ecology and evolution, as both have been brought to the fore by the urgency that faces us to find solutions to ecological crises.  Gibson’s work on affordances is quite radical, which makes it both interesting and controversial.  In this paper the key issues in his work will be revisited, partly as a response to Derry’s recent article on the subject.  This paper will try to consolidate the value of the ‘ecological turn’ that Gibson’s work has stimulated, while resolving some of the apparent contradictions that the idea of ‘direct perception’ (of affordances) has raised. …………..

Conclusion

We need, as always,  to build on and to progress beyond the insights of our intellectual heritage, and Derry has usefully identified some of the seemingly unresolved issues in Gibson’s writing, as well as some of the current uses of the term ‘affordance’ which amount to little more than the now discredited ‘technological determinism’ of ‘media effects’ debates of the 60’s and 70’s.  We need to keep the ecological thrust of Gibson’s work, namely the idea of an affordance as the product of an interaction between the organism and the environment. We can then link this to a rigorous semiotic epistemology, including an understanding of science and formalised knowledge as an exceptional semiotic, to arrive at a more nuanced, richer concept of an affordance as the product of the interaction between the person and the environment, in which each interaction potentially alters the knowledge, capacity and identity of the person, as well as the (micro-) environment.   Within a rigorous semiotic epistemology, as well as a rigorous ecological epistemology within the framework of complexity theory, these interactions will, of course, be seen to be social, normative and ecological, and will be informed by, and even ‘infused’ in part by, all the most powerful semiotics, including science, the arts, religion and globalised finance, some of which are based on ‘reason’.  

Narratives and Biographies

There are a number of different ways to use narratives for researching and exploring affordances in learning.

In the Affordances project, we are focusing on ‘retrospective coherence’, in line with complexity theory, which states that ’complex’ events  are best described retrospectively, as you dont know, and cant know, exactly how they will pan out - they just arent that ’predictable’.

However, there is some interesting research that does work more ‘prospectively’, and here is a useful resource to explore just that, and to focus in more on biographies rather than on learning per se….

From Margaret Volante, at Surrey:

If you are interested in using narrative interviews in social research, you can get a sense of it by asking for a free electronic copy of the updated version of the ‘Guide to Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method’ . Write directly to Tom Wengraf, indicating your institutional affiliation and what you might use such narrative interviews for.  He will then send you the updated current version right back. With a full bibliography, it complements and takes further his 2001 textbook ‘Qualitative research interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured method’ (Sage). His address for a free copy is   tom@tomwengraf.com.  

Affordances, not!

There is a joke going the rounds about email and tomatoes, which is quite interesting.

Its amusing, which is always a good thing, but is also a useful example of the fact that many, if not most affordances are double edged swords: they can enhance or impede your ‘knowledge, capacity and identity’.  It can go either way, and particularly with the rate of techological change, and the agressive marketing of the ‘next’ gadget for all you early adopters out there, one just has to be a bit wary.  

The punch line in this story is that you can exploit some affordances by shutting down others.  

Jobless Man  A jobless man applied for the position of “office boy” at Microsoft.The HR manager interviewed him then watched him cleaning the floorAs a test. “You are employed” he said. “Give me your e‑mail address andI’ll  send you the application to fill in, as well as date when you maystart”. The man replied “But I don’t have a computer, neither an email.”

“I’m sorry”, said the HR manager, “If you don’t have an email, that means you do not exist. And who doesn’t exist, cannot have the job.”

 The man left with no hope at all. He didn’t know what to do, with only $10 in his pocket. He then decided to go to the supermarket andbuy a 10Kg tomato crate. He then sold the tomatoes in a door to doorround. In less than two hours, he succeeded to double his capital. Herepeated the operation three times, and returned home with $60. The man realized that he can survive by this way, and started to go everyday earlier, and return late. Thus, his money doubled ortripled everyday. 

Shortly, he bought a cart, then a truck, then he had his own fleet of  delivery vehicles. 5 years later, the man is one of the biggest food retailers in the US. He started to plan his family’s future, and decided to have a life insurance. He called an insurance broker, and chose a  protection plan. When the conversation was concluded, the broker asked him. The man replied, “I don’t have an email “. The broker answered curiously, “You don’t have an email, and yet have succeeded to build an empire. Can you imagine what you could have been if you had an email?!!”  

The man thought for a while and replied, ” Yes, I’d be an office boy at Microsoft!” 

Moral of the story

M1‑ Internet /email is not the solution to your life.

M2 ‑ If you don’t have internet / email , and work hard, you can be a millionaire.

M3 ‑ If you received this message by email, you are probably already an office boy/girl, and not any close to being a Billionaire… 

Have a great day !!! P.S ‑ Do not forward this email back to me, I’ m closing my email &Going to sell tomatoes!!! _______________________________________      

Faery Stories

Taking the Plunge

 One of the affordances of stories (and there are many) is the affordance that faery stories offer.  Faery stories give you a template for telling rich, important (and sometimes scary) stories of your own …

  A week or two after attending the Sceptre conference on Immersive Learning at Surrey University in January, where we were immersed in all kinds of learning, I am still trying to figure out what immersion is all about, and how you would recognise it in the dark at 50 paces.

If I go back to my experience of the Conference event itself, the best metaphor I have for it is ‘taking the plunge’, with strong echoes of Alice in Wonderland. Borrowing from Dave Snowden’s work (with some licence perhaps!), I want to see how useful it is to use the magic of faery stories to make the links to strong experiences, and to explore what the experience of ‘immersive learning’ is all about at the level of myth and metaphor, first of all, without being too intellectual about it (that can come later).  

Plunge into what? 

Mutual Risk/  Magic: Uncertainty, disruption, suspending belief, disassociation, resonance and harmony, unexpected connections, collaboration, inversion, displacement, . 

How do we get in? .. 

Down the Rabbit Hole: Strip-out our contexts and comfort zones;  free-fall, interact with the strange/r; disclose, explore intimacy and silence,  trust, fun, working together: physically, without words really is the most powerful; with support and back-up clearly in place.

Where are we going? 

Wonderland …  A place where we can scramble the given/ current reality, play with the emergent patterns, divert happily into the aesthetics of new patterns, take a deep breath, and return back to the quiet of the meadow (Christchurch meadow for Alice). 

How do we get back/ out?

We turn to our narrator… The person who ‘knows the story’: surely the reader of the faery story is an essential part of the experience of magical stories: the archetypal guide?  Faery stories are risky things to get involved with.  

What do we need to look out for?

Friends, surprises, emergent outcomes, new event horizons, useful frozen accidents, bottomless pits, dark places, poisonous mushrooms. 

How do we proceed?

With caution, taking our time, building awareness of what’s hidden in the forest.  And if we’re very lucky, we have our own fool to accompany us too (we had two fools at this conference!). 

So what’s all this got to do with Higher Education then?

Someone said that the transition into H.E. is about becoming comfortable with uncertainty, or developing a ‘tolerance of uncertainty’; I would add another too: the celebration of uncertainty.  We could say that tolerance of uncertainty is a prerequisite for becoming part of  Higher Education;  the celebration of uncertainty is a prerequisite for ‘membership’. In other words, you know you’ve arrived in higher education when you enjoy the beauty and serenity of sitting in the meadow as much as you enjoy the uncertainty of falling down imaginary rabbit holes.  

CAN Design?

What I have  in mind is  a design brief:   Can you design a learning (etc) space or event, with only a few rules, lots of degrees of freedom, a measure of background safety net, and keep a few disruptive bollards behind your back to throw into the mix where necessary? And can architects, town planners, traffic designers (see Naked Streets), festival organisers, social software designers, playground designers, unconference designers, organisational developers (Dave Snowden), story tellers, etc do this too?If so, are they doing ‘the same thing’?If so, how do we keep all these CANs from going ferral? (e.g. micro-global finance, micro-global terrorism)I am dispositionally averse to case studies, but … Are there interesting cases (retrospectively coherent ones, if you must) in:

Traffic roundabouts

Txting

Naked Streets

Social software

Hole in the Wall project

Grameen Bank

email

Workshops

LOGO/ Mindstorms

Life (computer simulation)

Montessori materials (see Trinomial Cube)

I think I  design learning spaces online as CANs, and I think the basic design for online simulation games are CANs.  

The riposte, of course, is:

If you can design CANs, can you design for inclusivity/ equity? (pardon the bad puns).

The best I’ve got so far is “CAN Design?”  Perhaps the  question is:   how can we create/design ecologies in which CANs are likely to emerge (that ‘design’ word  keeps creeping in).

Bumping into CANs in the Night

The good news on CANs (’complex adative networks’) is that it is true that many of the connections are self-organising.  But its also true that you never know what you dont bump into in the cyber-night! 

There’s a long version of this argument on the Affordances wiki.  

Retro Sense making

The methodology that we will be using for the Affordances for Learning project is based on Actor-network theory and Complexity theory.  One of the key issues, both methodologically and epistemologically, is obviously: how is the data constructed, and how do we make sense of it?

There’s some interesting stuff in there …

In traditional research design, you are required to specify your methodology and your ‘data collection’ in some detail, in advance, at the proposal stage.  However, firstly, its more useful if we are looking at complex adaptive sytems, or complex adaptive networks (CANs) to see the data as ‘constructed’ rather than just ’sitting there’ waiting to be ‘collected’.

Secondly, it is useful to limit the extent of prospective coherence in our methodology, and focus instead on retrospective coherence.  If we define affordances as the product of the interaction between the individual and the environment, then affordances are what emerges after, and through, such interactions, and affordances are subject to the changes in the identies of the participants and the micro-ecologies, both of which are self-organising to at least some extent.  

If meaning is contextual (broadly speaking it is, as a working hypothesis) and if the context, or the ecology, including the identities of the actors within it, is changing, then in any Complex Adaptive Network we really do need to focus on retrospective coherence.   There is no reason why we should not specify what coherences we might find, prospectively, but we should not be limited to that, or by that. 

 Rather, we should set up our research so that we are confident that several ‘tracks’ of data (or sets of ‘traces’ in Latour’s terms) are generated during the period we are interested in, and then we should retropectively explore those traces (preferably with the help of the people who constucted them) to see if there are any emergent events, patterns, identities, activities, etc that we can identify and describe.  

What this does is it separates off the generation and construction of primary data from the analysis.   Ideally the data should be generated naturalistically, within the process as it would happen without the research.  The process of sense making should be able to engage retrospectively, without privileging any specific aspects ahead of time - without giving any parts of the data a ‘heads-up’ so to speak. 

Our curiousity, in other words, should not be confined to either confirming or rejecting the null hypothesis, we should look for the unexpected and the surprising, and systematically explore whether we can make sense of the unexpected, based on the traces - the ‘data-within-narratives’ - including both the ’stories’ and the ’story-tellers’ and the interactions between the two.

Where to start?

One of the key issues we are debating as we head for start-up in the affordances for learning project is whether we start by asking students to help us fill in the details on a people/media matrix, to ‘track’ what they actually do (and then write it up as a narrative), or whether we first ask them to write (or record, verbally) their narrative, and then ‘track’ that across a matrix.  My own thoughts at the moment are that precisely the ‘emergence’ will work best if we start by getting people to tell each other their story, then write it down, then transfer to the matrix (rather than the other way round).    

Puuddles

Interesting thing about Poodles - it appears that the name, which is now synomymous with Parisienne chic, is a corruption (or slippage) from something much less glamorous: from the German “Puddelhund” (sp?) which presumably was a dog that was bred for hanging out in muddy puddles. 

Nice career move there,  Fido!

Tracking …

How do we know if learning has taken place, and if it is of value?   The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that

1.  You have to start by tracking what actually happened - basic epiricism.

2. You have to give the learner an opportunity to give ‘voice’ to their own account of what happened, without first constructing a maze of questions, categories, potential statistical or qualitative analyses for the learner to battle through.  So start with a simple tracking account - ask the learner what happened. 

3. You can then start looking at the different affordances that were created, discovered, exploited.  Its spans a huge range, of people, places, technologies, connections.   But maybe the affordance is simply: an opportunity for Roy to find another way to talk about ‘affordances’ (technology buffets… see below).

Here’s an example.  Its my own (brief) account of how I engaged with the Global JAM that Knowledge in the Public Interest ran recently.   

  Its called ‘Roy’s Tale’ …

How did I go about this?

This is the first draft of my own narrative of my involvement in the JAM.  It might serve as an exemplar, or spark some ideas as to how people could write their own narratives and trackings of their own involvement.  It is useful to me because I am starting a research project into how people use resources (media and humans) to create their own affordances for learning.  Just seeing whether I could write this narrative, and seeing whether it started to take on a useful ‘form’ is certainly enough for me to feed into my research on learning, even though the tracking tools I will be using there are a little different.  You will see that write an account and reflect on it at the same time - that’s just the way I write. 

This is the first draft of my narrative … 

0. How did I get here?

I have been part of a European Conference on Knowledge Management for some time.  In 2006 I went to the conference in Budapest, and met Diana and Susan from Knowledge in the Public Interest.  At the conference dinner on the Danube we spoke some more, and started to exchange notes and resources.  That got me connected to the JAM in the first place.

1. Signed on for the jam, as a facilitator 

2. Comfortable that I could manage my different roles as facilitator/ expert/ participant

(wrong: it was far more complicated than that for me, although some people, seemed to have done this with alacrity and ease)

3. Found the pre-jam discussions interesting

• Later, in retrospect, wondered whether the organisers should have used this session to edit the formulation of the questions, or sharpen them up a bit, rather than set them up before the discussion started as a given.
• Question: if you are a facilitator, do you need to have some input into the tasks you are going to facilitate, or can you just facilitate someone ‘else’s’ tasks?  On the other hand, the Jam was, legitimately, a knowledge-gathering exercise by a very specific group, who wanted to get something very specific out of it: specific advice, or at least frameworks for advice, for practical tasks. 
• Still cant decide one way or the other on this one yet: it could go either way. 

4. At the start of the jam, found myself getting straight into the debate, particularly the question of whether we should be looking for technologies or for affordances. 

5.  Referenced and linked to a number of social software network nodes:

• Parts of my own blogs and wikis
• Contributions I had made to other people’s wikis
• Useful collaborative sites (visualcomplexity.com)
• Started harvesting links into a repository/ jotter that I use, called Star Tree Studios.

6. Started writing new headings for posts (as did other people), to put more ‘sign-posting’ into the long scroll of the discussions. 

7.  Much later, connected up with a useful line of thought, brought in by Nancy, which eventually morphed into a very useful (if wordy) knowledge ‘chunk’:

Technology Buffets for Supporting Interesting Practices

It needs quite a bit of work, but the basics are there, in plain English.  ‘Affordances’, much as its dear to my theoretical heart, is a non-starter for general conversation

8. Started linking back into other network nodes:

• My own blogs and wikis
• A new wiki (to capture and organise outputs of the JAM)
• Comments on other people’s comments on yet other people’s blogs (my comment on Dave Pollard’s blog, on a post of Dave’s that Nancy commented on in the JAM), which I also posted to a blog of my own.

9. Put some of my own frustration at the discomfort of reading and scrolling through soooooo much stuff into a rather fanciful proposal to write a new software platform for Jamming, called: “new JAM-jars”.   

10. Emailed Diana and Laren on setting up a discussion and wiki, post-JAM, and this wiki is the result.