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’.
