Abstract:

The term affordance is widely used to discuss the value new learning technologies might provide for education, yet at the same time it has been criticised for being “too ambiguous to be analytically valuable” (Oliver, 2005, p.1). But what if we could quantify the affordance that specific tools provide in specific contexts? This session will introduce the APT Methodology (short for the Alignment of Pedagogy and Technology) which uses an updated definition of affordance to do exactly this; quantify the affordance of digital tools given a specific pedagogic context.

The product of a doctoral thesis (Osborne, 2014), the APT methodology focuses on the ‘transaction possibilities’ that lie between a specific pedagogical framework and individual digital tools, applying a keyword-based approach to tease out what a digital tool “provides or furnishes” (Gibson, 1979, p.127) from an affordance perspective. This technique produces not just an alignment, but a quantifiable number for that affordance. The methodology has been successfully applied with several pedagogic frameworks, including a model for designing authentic assessment, the United Kingdom Department for Education Teachers’ Standards and most recently the ABC (Arena, Blended, Connected) Learning Design method (Young & Perovic, 2016) from University College London (UCL).

This session will introduce the theory behind the APT methodology and discuss its latest application at UCL where it is being used to align digital tools and technologies with the six learning types from Laurillard’s (2012) Conversational Framework. It will invite feedback on the product of this process, the ‘Tech Trumps’ (digital and/or physical playing cards in the Top Trump style) which can be used by educators to select the most ‘apt’ digital technologies to support their ABC learning designs.

References:
[1] Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
[2] Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York: Routledge.
[3] Oliver, M. (2005). The problem with affordance. E-Learning, 2(4), 402–413.
[4] Osborne, R. (2014). An ecological approach to educational technology: affordance as a design tool for aligning pedagogy and technology.
[5] oung, C. and Perovic, N. (2016) Rapid and Creative Course Design: As Easy as ABC? Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, no. 228, pp. 390-395.

Keywords:

Affordance, Pedagogy, Methodology, Alignment, Digital, Learning Types, ABC.