Week 6 - Affordance Analysis

I don’t know if it’s my recent decision to go off coffee, the exhaustion of my heavier than normal load at work, but when I approached “Affordance Analysis - Matching Learning Tasks with Learning Technologies” I found it completely inscrutable. I sat, in the silent stacks at the library, hoping that somehow my highlighter would magically sense what was important in this piece. I found it really challenging, and silently hoped that this impenetrable prose was not to be the academic norm. I remember the dismay with which my British Literature students approached Milton’s Paradise Lost and suddenly completely understood how they’d felt.

I put “Affordance Analysis” away for a few days and came back to it at a different place and time of day. When I gave it another chance, eventually some sense began to emerge. I still found it difficult to parse , but I was starting to make some sense of it. What I understand was that Mr. Bower was simply trying to present a method for matching tech tools to tasks that might produce learning gains. I’m not sure I understood all of it, saw the point to some of his made up terms (words like synchronous-ability seemed particularly silly to me) or saw the point of his chart at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I saw the usefulness (or useful-ability) of his method. Even before I was a DooDLS student I’d wondered about the best way to choose technologies for the classroom.

Our exploration play with the Ozobots helped me understand this. Educators should consider thoughtfully and carefully when choosing tech tools for the classroom. A cart of laptops that never gets unlocked does nobody any good. Gizmos and robots twinkle and dart about, and seem really cool, but might not have any real value in the classroom. Bowers’s article explains that there is a real method we can use to help us choose the “right and wrong” tools for our classrooms and learning environments. We can consider first what authentic problems we want our students to tackle, and what tasks will help them do it. Next, we can consider the skills and knowledge they’ll need to get these tasks done. Then we can begin to consider what tools are well suited to these tasks. The right match might be as simple as a marker and some poster board. It might be as low tech as a plastic model of the nervous system. An iPad is only as useful as the learning task that’s accurately matched with it, and Bower’s article gives us a way to make that match.