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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Things or Relations?

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.   

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.