Affordances with Technology

With so many software and hardware resources available for education, it is important to be able to navigate through them and choose the right tool for a given job. Any task can be done many ways with many tools, but some resources may be a better fit for the learning outcome students are trying to achieve. As educators, this can be a challenging task of sifting through the clutter.

According to Bower (2008), there are a number of different affordances for educational systems. Below are some for some resources:

- iMovie - Media affordances as it allows for audio, visuals, video, and text to create a video product.
- GarageBand - The media affordance allows for the creation of music.
- Google Docs - The usability is easy for collaboration, it can allow for media usage within the documents and the sharing functions all for access-control affordances.

The complete list of affordances are:
- Media affordances
- Spatial affordances
- Temporal affordances
- Navigation affordances
- Emphasis affordances
- Synthesis affordances
- Access-control affordances
- Technical affordances
- Usability
- Aesthetics
- Reliability

By using these affordances, an educator can think critically about the use of a tool and why it is a good choice for a specific task.

References

Bower, M. (2008). Affordance analysis – matching learning tasks with learning technologies, Educational Media International, 45(1), 3-15. DOI: 10.1080/09523980701847115