.During the first webinar last night one of the participants asked what is the point of the technology? How can it help us to help our students be more creative? He asked it because he was a member of MMU staff and he would be attending the university's workshop on Thursday and I think he was perplexed by what seems like an apparent emphasis on the technology. Chrissi said it was all about connecting with other people that we would not normally be able to connect to and of course this is true. Living in southern England and not being a member of MMU I can only participate in this process  because of the technological infrastructure that chrissi and the internet have made available.
 
But there is another point I'd like to make which connects to the post I made yesterday. It's about affordance - our relationships to and engagement with each other in this process through the affordances that the technology provides. Affordances that have yet to be revealed to us. I think that some or much of our creativity will be engaged and emerge through our relationships and interactions with this environment which is invites and encourages us to act in particular ways. I welcome other perspectives on this. 
 
I get lots of pleasure from producing illustrations so here is one I have created to try to capture the themes of connecting and affordance.. Oh I almost forgot - technology helps you create things you could not do by other means - it extends our repertoire of ways of creating stuff and helps us to feel good about bringing something visual into existence.

Additional points grown through participation in the open learning course

I'm a Teaching Fellow & Librarian at the University of Huddersfield, plus do bits and pieces of training, etc., outside my "day job", which get pulled together on my website if anyone is interested! I enjoy trying new ideas out and playing with different approaches to developing the information literacy of students and staff.

People have relationships with technology that enabled them to curate and share resources that they find useful and when they are willing to share their personal resources, for example through te invitation that was posted on the community website the technology enables others to benefit and perhaps new relationships may form through this process.

I'm delighted that Chrissi Nerantzi invited me to be one of the facilitators  on the'Creativity for Learning in Higher Education' mini mooc which begins today.

It will be an entirely new experience for me and I can see that I will learn a lot so I'm using this blog to record some of my experiences and reflections for my co-participants.

My first task is to familiarise myself with the various technologies and platforms that are being used. Here's a map of the technologies I have started to use. If you want to make your own illustration you can download the powerpoint slide that I used to make the jpeg.


Powerpoint slide of the technologies I'm using

Personalising the idea of affordance

I'm currently writing about ecologies for learning and in particular about the idea of affordance. I imagine that this course will offer significant affordance for so many things but the detail will only emerge as I involve myself in this environment and I create my own process for learning.​ Much has been written about affordance and I have yet to fully comprehend what it means and make it meaningful to me in my own life. My current understanding is based on what various authorities have said:

The environment includes qualitative regions of functional significance (affordances) that are visible to individuals with reciprocal skills (effectivities) and the intention to act (Gibson, 1986).

Affordance resides neither in the learner nor in the object, technology or environment, but in the relationship between the two (Williams et al 2008:17)

An affordance is an action possibility formed by the relationship between an agent and its environment ......  (Nye and Silverman 2012).
    
While these possibilities for action exist as part of the environment, their meaning is realized only through the individuals interacting with their environment. From an ecological perspective, perception is a property of an ecosystem—not of an agent.
Barab and Roth 2006: 4) 

[t]he agent (i.e., an individual learner) is a closed (but unbounded) set of effectivities, or goal-directed functions, that identify the potential actions of the animal [individual] and that complement the affordances. The environment is a closed (but unbounded) set of affordances, or functionally defined goals, that identify the potential perceptions of the animal and that complement the effectivities. (Turvey & Shaw, 1979 :206)

A perceived affordance .......requires an agent to be aware of the affordance, either through direct perception or experience.... a perceived affordance is primarily a relationship between an agent’s cognition and the environment (Nye and Silverman 2012).

A perceived affordance describes a potential for action, the perceived capacity of an object to enable the assertive will of the actor (Williams et al 2008)

In the context of this course I can see (perceived affordance) that by connecting people who are interested in exploring something together and creating a virtual environment with technological tools to enable interaction, that there is new possibility for action. I can anticipate that there is good potential for new learning (and creativity) to emerge from conversations and other forms of communication. So at this level I can anticipate affordance based on past knowledge and experience of broadly similar situations. I can also anticipate that I will by observing others see affordances that they can see but I can't. But I cannot yet appreciate affordances that will emerge from the situations that have yet to be imagined and enacted.  

If an affordance is a possibility for action by an individual, an effectivity is the dynamic actualisation of an affordance......an effectivity set constitutes those behaviours that an individual can..produce so as to realise and even generate affordance networks. When an individual has a particular effectivity set, he or she is more likely to perceive and interact with the world in certain ways—even noticing certain shapes of networks that are unavailable to others (Barab and Roth 2006:6)

Once I realise an affordance by acting on my perception of the situation's potential for action I will be developing and demonstrating my effectivity for realising some aspects of affordance in this particular situation and context. But what actually emerges from the situation - the actualised potential -  might be quite different to what I thought might emerge. Also I know will learn from others who are more experienced than I am with these technologies ie knowledge about the affordance of an object can be learnt through social practice. After this experience I will have learnt something about the affordance of the objects and processes I am involved in and the insights and capability I gain can then be drawn upon in future situations.

Sources
Barab, S. A. and Roth, W. M. (2006) Curriculum-Based Ecosystems: Supporting Knowing From an Ecological Perspective. Available at: http://people.ucsc.edu/~gwells/Files/Courses_Folder/documents/BarabRothEDRES-2006.pdf

Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Goldstone, R. L., & Son, J. Y

Nye, B. D. & Silverman, B. G. (2012). Affordance. In N. M. Seel (Ed.),Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning (pp. 179-183). New York, NY: Springer. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1682&context=ese_papers

Turvey, M. T., & Shaw, R. E. (1979). The primacy of perceiving: An ecological reformulation of perception for understanding memory. In L. G. Nilsson (Ed.), Perspectives on memory research (167–222). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 
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Williams, R.T., Karousou, R., & Gumtau, S.  (2008). Affordances for learning and research  (Final project report for the Higher Education Academy). Available at: http://learning-affordances.wikispaces.com/Project+Report

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