 Thank you, afternoon all um so I'm here to talk about chickens uh potentially or multiple point affordance um So I play I won't be too long because it's strengths next um so affordance why don't you buy affordance well this was the subject of my um phd So I've turned a lot of time reading and learning about affordance and I think I've got a different take on it Which will be useful to share and I'm interested in hearing other people's ideas our thoughts on it um And why chickens will come to that um So one of my I work for ucl's faculty learning technology lead Um, what is that role we'll actually be talking about that tomorrow in a session just after lunch Me and two other faculty learning technology these from ucl so just plug in my own session tomorrow as well um So I'm sure you know about affordance. I mean affordance is a term we all use in in ed tech and it's a term that's used across Multiple fields. I mean that's part of the problem. It's been picked up in multiple fields ed tech of Robotics hti and so on and so forth. So it it's kind of lost its power of it And I think people want to be to come today to sort of well again, there's another idea of what affordance might be I mean, this is gibson's original concept and you know, so hopefully you know where it comes from gibson. I said, did I in the um visual Well ecological ecological approach to visual perception And he invented the term and it does have some precedent But he basically coined this new idea and what's key to me is my little diagram there is it It locates affordance in space It locates affordance between people in the world. It's not an object thing. It's not a person thing It's located in the relationship. We have with our environment because it's come from ecological psychology is an ecological concept um So he coined this this really good idea now You might well know that don norman who gibson knew and and they were you know Well buddies they did argue and fall out about this But don norman took the idea and he used it in his book the psychology of the things or the design of everyday things Norman was interested in design. He was interested in objects cups and things at tables and chairs And so he was looking at how the actual object properties of an object could be used And norman did realize that he kind of mess gibson's idea up a bit I mean, eventually he tried to reframe it as perceived affordances to try and clarify That's a different type of concept But it seemed to stick And years have gone by emigre and ho and others and lots of other people have written more on affordance as the years have gone And they tried to have this paper clarifying and evolving a concept And I think they did move a little bit back towards the human But it still remains fundamentally to my mind something locked in an object and the actions you can have on an object In fact, this line action possibility Is kind of where i'm headed here. It's an unusual idea of an action possibility Uh, and then there's a famous paper from her mind Oliver from, um, ioe you might know Martin's work He wrote 2005 the problem with affordance and I think he pretty much buried in that paper He said it's too ambiguous. It's not really useful. We use the term But often I read some papers this morning as I get regular digest on affordance and no one defines the term We just throw it in and then we don't really know what we're talking about um, so I think he was right in this way that it had become a little too ambiguous to be useful But going back to this idea of action possibilities See no Oliver talks about Martin Oliver talks about action possibilities in his 2005 paper This gibson's notion of an action possibility. It's in interaction design foundation It's in coins dictionary. It's the definition of affordance. Many people seem to think Affordance and action possibilities are the same thing Um, it's not I've read pretty much everything gibson never wrote on this I think and pretty much everything else ever wrote on this Gibson never mentions this. It's not something he ever talks about action possibilities It's not something a concept that's in affordance So I don't know where this is drifted into the conversation But if you look in the literature, it's often what you'll see talked about when it comes to affordance I mean take my chicken again. I'm back to my chicken on and the road But what's the action possibilities of a chicken again gibson talks about in ecological terms He talks about being frozen in a blizzard and being burnt in a fire. You know, are these action possibilities Can I choose to get frozen in a blizzard? Because that is the road flat enough and hard enough to support the chicken's weight and that's the action is then walking It doesn't make sense in the concept of why a chicken crosses the road. There's no affordance there That's kind of coming out of gibson's theory So going back to gibson again, and this is what I read more deeply into what gibson was on about Well, I think what surface and what we've lost in terms of affordance what we need to go back to is intention is needs We all exist in this room now With a certain concept of what we want to do what we're going to do next Why we came here in the first place whether or not the drink is going to be cold Whether this guy's going to have stopped going on about affordance theory You know, we all have a we're not in a bubble We have intentions and needs and we're all different in kind of what we're thinking of too and gibson appreciated this You know, he says the all the affordances are there But what you have tend to is based on need on what you intend to do next And you know, we can demonstrate with the chair a classic example is the chair is I if I'm tired I can pull up one of these chairs and I can sit down the affordances there because it links my need with my tiredness If I want to reach something high up and I want to fiddle with this camera gate I can climb on it. It's strong. It's got my weight. I can light enough so I can move it You know, it's a new affordance and maybe there's a fire. I can smash a window and well, I'm sure I want to jump out I didn't know I'd be on the first floor But for me what I'm guessing to now is this idea of the transaction Um, it's not what we can act on but some more matters. It's the transaction that matters And it's this concept of transaction possibilities So I'm trying to call in a new term for affordance, which is transaction possibilities as opposed to action possibilities I think as educators, we're more interested in transaction So my little diagram here what I'm trying to show is my little man is staring forward in time Um, and on the left hand side, you see the actions. It's a snapshot moment. You can take an action That's the action possibilities. I've even thought it's not very useful Interaction where you can see where the hti guys are interested in the concept how it's useful because You know, you want to turn a knob or pull a lever or switch and things. It's an interaction over time So you're interested in how you can interact with it But personally, I think we're much more interested in this right hand side of transaction possibilities What you're interested in is what you're going to get back From interacting with an object not actually, you know, what you can do to it But what you're going to give you as educators. This is what I think is most important And this idea of transaction, you know, it's not new Um, juby is writing about this in education experience back in 38 You know, it's transaction. It's to his mind Not a penny cause of kind of education is he had a trio in his last paper about action interaction transaction transaction being the highest thing We're aiming for as educators and like I say in my in my quote It's like what the hell when I do this. This is what we're interested in as educators Okay, so what does all this mean in terms of practical stuff? What can why is this useful? Why is this was this handy? Well, um Why this came out to work on authentic assessment We had a JISC funded project I was working all the time and we were looking at designing authentic assessment models I don't know what to go by that now But authentic assessment if you haven't tried is difficult to pull off. It's challenging the melt of dimensions And we thought well, it's anyone Can we use technology to technology to support these complicated authentic assessments? So they had dimensions of time collaboration and uh audience and things So I know can we rate using this idea of transaction possibilities the affordance of off-the-shelf text now something like blogger It's very good at time actually because it's chronological. It can scaffold and support that kind of struck that dimension of authentic assessment Skype is very good a collaboration. It can support that dimension So we we're trying to match technology through to effectively the pedagogic design an authentic assessment design And I was thinking myself. Well, what we have here potentially is a methodology I've got a framework for authentic assessment in this case I've dimensionized it to try and tease out the key elements of authentic assessment And now I can rate technologies based on my criteria for the transaction possibilities in this context that define need again Go to the idea of need again And and actually get a number rating So that's what was the first thing we did was authentic assessment I then tried this technique with the uk teaching standards. I'm a qualified physics teacher So I I worked with schools for a while before cobin and I did the same as we have a popular cahoo quizlet and again, you're taking if you don't know the teacher's standards There's eight different style Sounds like I took six of them out the key six ones and again You can rate how well populate supports investigating how well ed puzzles supports motivating the key things you need to do as a teacher using this technique of Identifying need with a model like this, which is what you have to do as a teacher and then rating Each technology against these these dimensions Now finally I'm here at UCL now And of course UCL is home of the conversational framework Dana Loreau's conversational framework and the abc learning methodology if you haven't come across that So Dana Loreau she professor Loreau she Created this conversation framework and she has it within it six learning styles learning types, I should say not styles sorry And so what we're now working on well, I'm kind of fiddling with Is can we do the same thing with this? There are six learning Types discussing collaborative acquiring and again these are the moodle activities and resources We're looking at moodle. We're saying okay. You've got your database activity How can I rate that in the context of the conversation framework? Using this idea of affordances transaction possibilities and I can actually get cards These are my got physical packs of these extra mabe Which we we did use these in face to face bits before covid hit and that kind of so now they do digital But again, I'm going to quantify using a semi rigorous technique the affordance of specific technologies given the pedagogical context, so that's My presentation so I call this thing the app methodology for the line with pedagogical technology And it's relatively straightforward say theoretical framework dimensionalizing the critical aspects and then you can actually Rate the affordances using a keyword based approach, but I won't go into the amperage. I haven't got masses of time No, I have sprinted through that a bit faster. I feel Um So, yeah, why did the chicken customer? Well, again, it's for me. It's about me, you know chickens hungry. What's the go and get some chicken feet? So it's all about need me and of course thank you Um, they're digitally online digitally physical packs. I've got some with me and things. Yeah, for any of the teachers Standards, I've got physical packs of them But the the other cars are online. I mean the abc stuff is relatively new. We haven't done a lot of work on that yet But that's the plan, you know Yeah Yes, absolutely. There's an affordance. Now. Yeah, you're right The funds you need to have an affordance on the road of locomotion But I think the problem is the need thing gets dropped out of the equation because the chicken doesn't just walk off the road because the road's there then needs to be um, so No, if Yeah, yeah, I think the transaction possibilities approach from that perspective is the is the ability to support its weight But it's I'm I'm trying to get to I guess is the way from that action possibilities idea That action possibilities sends a locus more in the idea of an object As distinct and having an affordance if you're respective of what I'm trying to do Whereas this is trying to bring it more back on the learner and think well What are the learner trying to do in this context and therefore which of the affordances available? We're most relevant to their needs Yeah, you know, I think it's a really interesting People come up with questions and then you get the answer in but um, I think when you have to try as an exception to Try and get the design To get the standard academic team's work out as a design enforcement tools to use With their end user in mind for their affordance Because we kind of like Kind of design for them But which one of the challenges I always face is the tools that we have Part of the user then the work around yeah eggs right holes So one of the challenges we have is that I want with the academic teams Is to give them a blank analyst There's too much as no affordance at all. Yeah. Yeah, you have to come Once a bit. Yeah, absolutely I'll be that's that focusing in the abc if you not know abc framework is a very physical activity with a piece of paper and cards and The idea of these things is to throw a pack of digital cards in as well After you've done the learning design and then think oh, which are the best tools to support You know in this context But I've done this for all the Moodle tools and the database it throws out in the end was fascinating because it reveals Stuff about the technologies I didn't do it said Moodle is pretty rubbish at collaboration We think well, does anyone is that rocket science? We kind of knew that and we Moodle is not a great collaborative space That's what we have other spaces like zoom and teams and the rest of it But he came up with numbers to show that and then it showed database was great at doing assignments And I was like well, that's cool because I know some academics keep doing assignments with database It's working really well and I didn't expect that to happen. So it was the interesting experiment to do this Yeah, the surface is things you didn't expect