Take your mind for a virtual walk?

Time is a crucial component of affordances.  The trick is to allow a range of time-bytes (from 180 second bytes to minutes, to hours) for the learner to explore a learning byte.  This is possible if face-2-face learning, (on-campus) is based on learning activities and resources that are available to learners prior to the ‘contact’ time with the lecturer or tutor.  It is also possible in asynchronous distance learning online, of course.  The question is, what other virtuous dynamics /virtuous affordances/ virtuous cycles (its difficult to know what to call them) can resonate with the learning bytes? 

Music

Music resonates (in more ways than one) with conversation and with thought.  One of the founders of Knowledge Management uses Mozart concertos for writing, as the movements resonate with the phases in his creative process.  A colleague is exploring the interaction between music and chat in an online community (which is about music, but might also be about other things).  

Walks in the Real World

In an ‘elastic’ learning space, where you can take as much time (within limits) as you want, you have time to take your mind for a walk, a bath, a look out the window, etc, while part of your brain mulls over the learning byte, and tries out some responses.  Back in your task-focused conscious mind, you can then formulate and post a response: to an online discussion, or to an on-campus tutorial later on.  

Virtual Worlds

But why not take your mind for a walk in a virtual world?  You can choose from the virtual world referred to above in the comments on Music, where ‘music is the food of thought’ so to speak, or you could take your mind for a walk in any number of closely related, or wacky, virtual worlds.     The interesting question is: if we regularly take our minds for a walk while chewing on a learning byte, in the ‘real’ world, what happens when the other affordances, in the growing range of ‘virtual’ worlds also become available for taking our minds for a walk?   Or: how much disruption / inter-ruption, co-ruption is good for you?  What resonates positively with the affordances of elastic time?  What is discordant?  

Time for Affrodances

Time is obviously a key aspect of affordances. Different time frames allow you to do different things.  Consider the affordances of conventional lectures: a verbal presentation, often accompanied by powerpoint, or ‘death-by-bullet points’.  Leaving aside the question of whether these bullet points are a distraction from learning rather than an aid, lets just focus on time.  

Each paragraph might take about 3 minutes to deliver. In that time the student must listen, remember, read the bullet points, and take notes, or annotate the powerpoint slides, if copies have been distributed before the lecture. This is a great affordance for the student who is reasonably familiar with the subject, and also processes information fast.  But not all students respond best to learning which is delivered rapidly, in 180 second bytes.  At the start of a course, all the students probably try to respond to this delivery format, and try to ‘become’ rapid-processors of information.  They might in other words try to make this into an affordance for themselves.  But they wont all succeed, and often they have little option: its 180-second-bytes or bust (and regroup later for damage control and repair). 

Further, the sequential delivery of lectures means that the underlying conceptual frameworks that inform the lecture are in many cases left implicit, and may, as affordances, be hidden from the students, particularly those who need to learn most from the presentation. Compare this with a well structured, flexible learning landscape, which provides students with a range of affordances and learning paths.  The bright, up-to-date student can still progress rapidly, if the resources and information are structured so that they can skip large amounts of information that they, specifically, don’t need to explore in detail.  

The student coming into the course with less experience and ability will need to explore the resources in more detail, and if these resources are structured (both conceptually and visually, in the layout) in layers, then a range of students can explore these resources in a just-in-time and just-for-you mode.  So, the affordances of learning spaces, or learning landscapes, include critical affordances of time – the broader the range of time, the broader (and more useful) the range of affordances.

Shared or Individual?

In a conversation with a colleague, I was asked whether affordances are shared, or not.  I hadn’t though of it before, to be honest.  I was also asked whether affordances were like learning, which was once defined as: “what remains when we’ve forgotton all we’ve been taught”, to which my response was:

Maybe you’re right, and maybe Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat model might be what we need here.  On the Wolf blog of 2006-12-04 [http://ofow.blogspot.com] I referred to something similar:  

Learning #1 …Learning is the smile that arises from …

interesting conversations

interesting experiments

and good practise, 

and  

 Learning #2 …Learning is the smile that arises from …

Exploring,

Benchmarking,

And  mastering,  new affordances. 

‘Learning # 1′ I have used in Doctoral research programmes to emphasise that research is about becoming part of an ongoing conversation, albeit you first have to put in the interesting experiments and good practise to do so.   ‘Learning #2′ focuses more on affordances. I usually tell a story to illustrate what affordances are:  Visualise the following two scenarios:  In scenario A, an adult comes into a room, and sees a table and chairs.  The adult says: “That’s great, there’s a nice table and table cloth, so with a bit of rearranging, and some better lighting, I can invite some friends round and we can have a dinner party”.    In scenario B, a four year old child comes into the same room, and says “That’s a problem. The table is too high for me to draw on it, but too low to walk under, and I’m likely to hit my head. But wait a minute, if I turn it upside down, and throw the cloth that’s on top of it over the legs, I can invite some friends round, we’ll have a great house to play in”.   Some food for thought … 

1. Are affordances shared? No, not in the first instance.  For Gibson, who was an ecologist, and who focused on perception, an affordance is first of all what one person makes of the environment, starting with what they perceive.   However, it goes without saying that both adult and child are drawing on a whole range of shared affordances (playing, dining, socialising, entertaining).  Further, both the adult and child are going to ‘party’ in some sense, so the affordances they create and exploit are (also) inherently social ones.   

2. Do affordances alter the environment? Of course.  Gibson would go so far as to say that what you perceive, right from the start, are affordances, not ‘things’ (not sure I go along with that entirely, but its an interesting approach).   However, as soon as you start interacting with those affordances, other possibilities emerge, and you start seeing, and constructing, new affordances. To put it simply: you dont see the table the same way the next time you come into the room! 

3. Do affordances alter the individual?For sure.  The ‘ecological’ point,  is that: 

3.1 Each interaction within an ecology alters, adjusts, refines, resonates, dissonates, with other parts of the ecology: that’s what ‘ecologies’ are. 

3.2 Individuals (certainly human, but anything with DNA will do) have identities (one or more of : biological/ cultural/ social/ professional, etc), and these identities grow, emerge, evolve, or devolve dynamically as they create, exploit, consolidate their affordances.  If you apply this to our two scenarios, in both cases the people would become ‘good people to know’ if their ‘party’ was a success, but they would become ‘people to avoid’ if their ‘party’ bombed out (or if the kids got a clip on the ear for damaging the French polish on the table by turning it upside down).  These are interesting points in the narratives of the two scenarios, but more importantly, they are also interesting examples of the interdependence of affordances and identities. 

Tables and Poodles

I am interested in using the term “affordances” in Gibson’s radical, ecological, sense of the term.  My paraphrase goes something like this:   

An affordance is the product of the interaction between the learner and the environment.  Each interaction potentially alters the knowledge and identity of the learner, as well as the micro-ecology of the environment.   

Interestingly enough (because Gibson’s theory is an ecological theory of perception) this notion of affordances resonates with the concept of the sign:  the sign, too, is not a thing, but rather the product of the relationship between the signifier and signified.  

The ‘table as affordance’ is a useful place to start. A digression, though, before we start into some semiotic byways: The resonance of the ‘table as affordance’ with ‘the dog as text’. 

For a minute, visualise a Poodle, and you can see how it has been ‘inscribed’ as a ‘working’ dog and how the ‘work’ that the Poodle does, and the work that the inscription on the Poodle does, has evolved from rural work for society to suburban, cultural work in ‘society’.  The Poodle as text has become a fully fledged member of Baudrillard’s simulacrum, in which all signs are celebrities: i.e. the signifiers are primarily valued for being signifiers, just as the celebrity is primarily famous for being famous.  

And the semiotic ‘resonance’ between, for instance, the fluff on the Poodle and the foam on the Star Bucks cappuccino, on the table next to the Poodle in the Parisian pavement cafe, is one of the key the sites (and sights) in which the textures of cultures, identities and affordances are forged. 

In my attempts to get to grips with affordances, I need a new lexicon, and a new thesaurus, and words like ‘resonance’, ‘texture’, and a host of terms borrowed from ecology, and complexity and actor-network theory, like ‘actants’, ‘emergent’ properties, and ‘event horizons’ will need to be employed.  

Hello world!

I will be using this space to think about how to get to grips with affordances for learning. This feeds into theoretical and empirical work on affordances, and on designing and developing learning spaces.