Title: The concept of affordances
Course: Stage 2: Course Design and Technology > Section: 2. Learning Theories, Strategies, and Affordances

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/55768291@N02/15199563765/

Gibson (1997) invented the concept of affordances to explain how people perceive the actions supported by the environment directly without having to ‘think’ about it. For example, we all know that a chair is for sitting on. This is its inherent property. Norman (Bower 2008:5) expanded the concept to focus on the perceived properties of an object - the wide range of things it can be used for. As an example, a chair can also be used to stand on to reach a book on a high shelf or chairs can even be thrown around.

When we talk about technologies such as tools within Moodle, we extend the idea of affordances so it doesn't only relate to physical objects. Then we can start to think about choosing software tools for particular learning activities. First, we identify the features / attributes needed for the task to work well and then we look for the online tool whose attributes best match up with these. We would not use an image editing tool to write an essay. We wouldn’t use a spreadsheet to edit a video. These are easy examples but sometimes the choices need a more thoughtful consideration of the options available to us.

Now undertake Activity 2.4: What are forums, blogs, and WhatsApp good for? (synchronous) which is an opportunity for participants in groups to reflect on the context and requirements of a learning activity and the affordances of forums, blogs and WhatsApp and then to choose the most suitable.