theorizing ICT affordances

I am working on theorizing ICT affordances for my thesis. I am tracing a connective trail from Gibson’s original concept of affordances as an interactive ecology of relationships between perception and the environment, through Norman’s use of affordances to describe the ecological relationships in the field of HCI, through to Kirschner’s work on theorizing the sociality of computer-supported collaborative learning.

Gibson provides an alternate route into conceiving our human experiences and our social relationships as ecologies of learning. Gibson’s work contributed to the emergence of ecological psychology. It was separate from Maturana and Varela’s work on cognition as enactive. Yet both approaches speak to interactivity and interconnectivity to sustain life. Gibson’s approach makes connections between the psychological, the experiential, and the physiology of perception. Maturana and Varela, and later, Varela, Thompson and Rosche, theorized cognition as physiological, experiential, and cognitive. Both streams of theory contribute to a theory of our human existence as an ecology of learning, not as individuals operating within a nature versus nurture dichotomy.

I am writing about ICT affordances as the capacity for an individual or a group to perceive possibility in relation to the ICT resources they have available to them within an educational institution. The perception of ICT affordances in educational institutions depends on the history, experiences, and imagination of educators. If educators have not been exposed to the complex webs of interactive networks associated with any computing device, if they have not had the experience of utilizing computing devices within education institutions (which are unique to other institutional, organizational, or independent uses of ICT), if they have not had discussions with other educators, or read about other educators uses of ICT for teaching and learning, they are not going to have the capacity to perceive the ICT affordances available to them within the contextual conditions of their educational institution.

There are unnumbered resources and ways to utilize ICT for teaching and learning. Teachers do not need lists of things they could do. They need 1) reasons to take the trouble to learn; 2) learning opportunities that are interleaved with their day to day teaching practice; 3) communities of practice they can participate in to continue to evolve their understandings; 4) ways and means to advocate for the acquisition of ICT that fits with their philosophical, pedagogical and instructional approach.

The interesting part about ICT affordances and fostering more sophisticated teaching practices in educators is that it is not an expensive fix. This is a dialogic problem, not a technical problem. The issue of ICT resources in educational institutions has not been resolved, but it is not the problem that stands in the way of educators’ use of ICT in their teaching practice.

Filed under: learning to learn with ICT, learning to teach with ICT

critical inquiry and question development

Teachers face a daunting challenge when it comes to integrating ICT into their professional teaching practice. Historically, the challenge has been largely considered an instrumental problem: teach the teachers computers and they will use them in their teaching. This logically led to using a professional development model for training teachers to use digital technologies in their teaching: a workshop once or twice a year to introduce them to a software application or use of digital devices that might make learning more interesting, and send them back to their classrooms to implement these new techniques. However, the reality of teaching with digital technology is that it demands a philosophical, pedagogical, and instructional approach that is very different from traditional, or even constructivist, teaching models. Consequently, despite massive expenditures into ICT infrastructure for schools, and efforts to resource schools with digital technologies through PACs, teachers’ adaptations to ICT learning cultures and commensurate changes to pedagogy and instructional design have been extremely limited.

The current situation begs the questions, “How have professional educators’ ICT perspectives and practices have been developed? Why do educators continue to believe the use of ICT in their professional practice is an add-on, or something extra? Why do educators continue to discuss the use of ICT to improve learning existing curriculum? Why is there a profound lack of discussion about what it means to incorporate ICT into the profession of teaching as an ongoing discussion?”

I suggest government policy and initiatives, administrative responses, and school based cultures constitute a system of ICT perspectives and practices that will continue to isomorphically reproduce pre-digital cultures of learning and professional practices. This isomorphic reproduction is not specifically articulated, in fact, examining speech acts associated with ICT, especially with regards to the BC Ministry of BC Education Plan, suggests educators are aware of the need to incorporate ICT and ICT cultures of learning into educational institutions. Isomorphic reproduction is taking place in the absence of critical inquiry into existing contextual conditions, and the lack of opportunity for educators and stakeholders to engage in critical discourse about the meanings associated with incorporating ICT into education (much less the logistical, ethical, and technological complexities that attend this effort).

There are infinite examples of ways digital technologies can be incorporated to enable, enrich and enhance learning. There is a continuous emergence of social learning networks online, whether they are taking place on websites, discussion forums, blogs, email lists, micro-blogging, etc. These activities are taking place outside institutions and proliferating at an unprecedented rate. Our collective access to information and technology is changing learning paradigms and learning relationships on a global scale. Any teacher that wants to take advantage of these resources has ample access to learn about, develop, design, and implement ICT pedagogies and active learning instructional designs.

What gets missed, and what needs attention, is the step between existing educational ICT perspectives and practices, and the individual and collective momentum of taking up the challenge of engagement. I argue this preliminary step, of creating opportunities to have the difficult discussions about what it means to become ICT pedagogues and on-the-fly digital media instructional designers, continues to be neglected. Without the opportunity to have these discussions, to formulate the questions and critically inquire into the contextual conditions these changes will take place within, educators will continue to struggle, and will, inevitable, revert back to familiar, if archaic, solutions to these tensions.

Filed under: learning to teach with ICT