Education has always benefited from the deployment of media to capture, revise, store and distribute information and learning. This has been true from the start of language, through moveable type printing, to broadcasting, to the Internet and mobile digital technologies. Education has also always been hamstrung by technological determinism, captured in the many wasted years spent in debates about ‘media selection’.
Clarke’s argument that media make “no significant difference” to learning is often quoted. Less often cited is his crucial codicil, namely that there are significant differences in approaches to learning, but that these “result from more rigorously designed instruction, not media effects”. So we need to focus on issues of learning design, rather than particular media or modes of delivery per se.
Clarke’s insistence on design is a first step in moving beyond ‘media selection’. But we can go quite a bit further if we use the term ‘affordances’ in Gibson’s radical sense of the term, to mean relationships and interaction. We need to be mindful that the term ‘affordances’ can be used to mean many different things, for instance Salomon defines it in a way that really takes us all the way back to the unhelpful ‘media selection’ discourse:
“ ‘Affordance’ refers to the perceived and actual properties of a thing, primarily those functional properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used” (quoted in an article by Conole and Dyke in Alt-J).
One of the great stories (and I think it has some truth in it) is the story of why Fax machine sales took off so quickly in Johannesburg, some years ago. The reason: Sandwich shops in the area started sending out lists of fresh sandwiches for order, that day, to the new fax machines in businesses in the area, who entered their order directly on the fax sheet, and faxed it back. A great affordance, but one that was determined by the imagination of the sandwich sellers, and the desire for fresh food, not by the technology.
Posted by roy 