Affordance Analysis

Affordance Analysis

This might have been the reading that hit home for me the most, although I’ve never heard the term affordance analysis. It sounds like something a company would do when making a decision to purchase something for their business, and maybe they do. Do they need to do an analyses on whether they can afford to make the purchase or not (I’m thinking money here)? It would make sense to me, we certainly do it at our house.  It didn’t occur to me to the uses in education.  I have often wondered how much money we spend (or waste) in education on technology that accomplishes nothing more than providing me with a different vehicle to deliver the same package. I will admit that I love technology and considered myself very open to trying new things out but after a while I started to think that maybe there was a different avenue to drive these new vehicles on. The other thing this made me think about was the technology should be in the hands of the students (drivers) so they can utilize them to support their classroom learning goals.

A lot of my previous thoughts on technology were self-serving, more about how I can utilize it to make my tasks more efficient. Being able to digitize and post all of my assignments, not having to manually calculate grades, give assessments that would be scored immediately, giving students access to content when hey aren’t in school, resources for them to access while not in school. While these are certainly great time and energy saving benefits, I started to wonder how they are supporting student learning. Maybe the smartboard, which I would consider maybe the greatest fleecing of education, isn’t a great learning tool but just an updated or glorified overhead projector. I’m sure there might be some (or many) who would disagree but I wonder how it supports learning if it isn’t in the hands of the students? Couldn’t I accomplish the same thing with an overhead projector and a whiteboard? Or better yet, having students with little smartboards (called dry erase boards) at their seats might be a more effective tool. Having said that, please don’t take my smartboard J

Doing the affordance analysis activity in class really opened my eyes and made me that if I’m in a position to preview a new technology, not to immediately jump for the “shiny object” in the room. Do my due diligence and encourage my colleagues to do an affordance analysis to see if it is something that will meet the criteria such as temporal, technical, usability, aesthetic and reliable affordances.