Affordance of Tools

Conole & Dyke (2004a):

At the beginning of the article, they pointed the importance for researchers to grasp the notion of affordance and limitation of technology. They defined affordances as the “perceived and actual properties of a thing, which defines how the thing could possibly be used”. They analyzed the affordances issue from the following perspectives: accessibility, speed of change. Both of them mentioned the issue of information overload and one issue brought up by rapidly change of information is people’s lack of reflective thoughts and authority of the information source. Technology also brings diversity to people. Information technology provides people with others’ experiences and situates people in a broader context of experiences and cultural environment. Technology also enriched people’s learning by providing collaborative opportunities to people.

Conole and Dyke brought the issue of peripheral participation, which could be a risk caused by technology. However, I would not worry this because students or novices usually start from peripheral participation. Teachers should provide opportunities to encourage students’ deep learning. I like the authors’ bringing up of one issue that it is not the ICT which promotes students’ deep level of reflection, it is how technology being used decides it. That is definitely true. Although ICT tools could provide students an opportunity to display their thoughts, it is teachers’ or peers’ prompts that encourage deep reflections.

At the end of the article, the author pointed out that there’re several open questions that are unsolved. One of the issues is the affordances Conole and Dyke interpreted came out of their particular view of social theory, especially activity theory which believes people should be situated in society. Personally, I think this is the most foundational theory on which this week’s readings based.  

Boyle & Cook:

As a commentary article to Conole and Dyke, Boyle and cook pointed out the concept of affordances conflates the issue of utility, “the action it affords for the user ” with usability, which means the perceptual information that indicates the affordance. The major critique to Conole and Dyke is they conflated affordances with abilities. From my understanding, affordance means features that were embedded in tools and abilities mean how people would take advantage of the features. However, usually, there is a gap between affordances and abilities. This is consistent with what Boyle and Cook pointed out: people need to adapt their behaviors or tune the technology a bit to align their behaviors with the technology, such as the CSCL literature reviewed in the article. Personally, I think this is very important. Even back from the first week reading, I thought that it is not technology’s fault that hinder technology’s facilitating role; it is people’s way of using technology made the hindering factors even worse.

In the article that Cnole and Dyle replied to Boyle & Cook, they pointed explicitly that technology affordance should not be defined as facilitating roles, but also limitations. Their purpose of having the taxonomy is to make the affordances (both facilitating and limitations) explicit to researchers.

Osiurak et al:

I think this is a bit difficult to read. I read this after the commentary articles. I think I should have read this piece first, as it explains theoretical issues in Conole & Dyke and Boyle & Cook.

At the beginning of the article, they were debating the definition of tools and what should be counted as tools. Alternative views of tools have objects that are manipulated, objects that are used to change the physical shape of another object.  In the section of ecological theory of tool use, Osiurak went over the concept of affordances brought up by Gibson, which appears a good explanation of the debate between Conole, Dyke and Boyle, Cook. Gibson suggested affordances of environment means it provides unlimited opportunities for human beings to explore. However, what is different from people to people is how they perceive the affordances of environment and take use of them. Therefore, “affordance is action-referential properties of the environment that may or may not be perceived”.

In the section of limitation of ecological theory, Osiurak proposed another relationship between tools and object exists, which is the dual relationship between objects and tools. Affordance is a “map” between people and the environment (or tools in the environment). However, this perfect map can’t explain the relationship between the objects and tools human could manipulate. This is one limitation of the theory. Osiurak et al pointed out once the goal of activities has been determined, the perception of affordances guides the process of choosing the most appropriate tools to manipulate the objects. Therefore, we could conclude it is the perception of affordance precedes the process of fitting tools with objects. Gibson pointed out that the theory of affordances could be used to describe the relationship between objects and tool. However, Osiurak noted that this is contradictory with the notion of affordance as an action-referential concept. Therefore, the theory of affordances left the question of how human beings decide the degree of mapping between tools and objects open—this provides opportunities for new theory comes in.

The dialectical theory proposed by Osiurak highlighted the goal of activities and selecting tools based on goals. It attributed human’s tool use to their technical reasoning. However, although nonhuman animals could use tools with repeated trial and error, they can’t perceive the underlying laws between which tools are appropriate to use and the affordances of tools. Osiurak pointed out that animals’ tool use is quite context-dependent. The dialectical theory of human tool use is complementary in terms of it combines the affordance theory and human technical reasoning together. Affordance theory explains the relationship between tools and humans’ perception of tools, technical reasoning explains why people choose particular tools for usage.

Straub

All of the three models introduced in the article are based on social cognitive theory which believes human beings learn not only from their own experiences but also from observing others. This sets the theoretical foundations of this article and this week’s readings.