Analyzing Affordance Analysis

Last week, we focused on the fifth design principle: The Means Principle. It is defined as the following:
Good learning designs reflect technologies chosen after mindful consideration of the cognitive and societal consequences as well as a clear and appropriate connection with content and learning activities. 
The Means Principle goes hand in hand with affordance analysis. In short, affordance analysis is the assessment of how a tool can be used and the purpose of the tool. For example, a hammer is not the proper tool to use to drink water. You could use a cup, ladle (although not very convenient) or jar. All of those tools are options to achieve the goal of drinking water. 
My biggest struggle this week is where to start. Do I start with the goal in mind and then look at the tools? Or can the tools provide inspiration towards a goal? It’s like which came first: the chicken or the egg? I’ve definitely guilty of having moments where I looked at a tool and said “this would be awesome for X activity” and figured out the goal as I dove deeper into designing the activity. But I’ve also had many moments where I started out with a goal in mind, then moved to the authentic problem, and eventually made my way to the tools. 

I guess my question is: is there a right way to do it? It was mentioned in class that, as designers, we should get into the habit of creating our goal first and the tools aid in achieving the goal, but I’d really like to hear the opinions of other educators :)

Comments

  1. Caitlin CordovaOctober 10, 2019 at 4:30 PM

    As we got our tools last week, I was thinking the same thing: do I pick my goal & tasks based on the tool, or mold the use of the tool to my goal & tasks? I think the whole process of affordance analysis is very fluid. It's the process that's important: "point being emphasized is the process of consciously identifying the affordances [given and required]" (p. 8); "use this framework as a guide" (p. 9). Referring back to the process diagram (p. 8), we can see that if the eLearning task design is faulty, we can go back to reconsider the affordance requirements of the task and potentially pick a different tool for the next time. Thinking of my own practice, if a tool doesn't work with a group of students exactly as I hoped it would, I can always go back to the drawing table to consider what I wanted my students to learn and what they needed to be able to learn. Part of our job as designers is to be be creative, and that could mean finding new ways to do old or failed things.

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    1. Michaela IbrahimOctober 19, 2019 at 10:09 AM

      I like the concept of the process being "fluid". The more we practice matching tools to our goal, the more we become experts and the process is more "fluid" or intuitive. Thank you for that perspective - exactly what I needed :)

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