H807-8. The affordances of email and blogs

Screenshot of my class blog

The concept of 'affordances' is new to me, and though I've come across it in the literature before, I've never taken the time to examine its definition, and I'm not sure even after doing so that I've grasped the meaning in its entirety. Kreijns et al. (2002) define social affordances thus:

"properties of computer-supported collaborative learning environments that act as social-contextual facilitators relevant for the learner's social interactions. When they are perceptible, they invite the learner to act in accordance with the perceived affordances, i.e. start a task or a non-task related interaction or communication."

Wow, that's a mouthful. An example or twelve would surely help. I turned to Conole and Dyke's (2004) taxonomy of affordances for something more concrete, and I will use these to inform my rough (rough) sketches of the affordances of email and blogs.

Email
I think the most striking affordance of email is immediacy. One thing I really liked about the Conole and Dyke (2004) paper was that in addition to enumerating advantages of each affordance, they also described factors that mitigate against these benefits. The immediacy of email is a case in point. On the one hand, email enables users to exchange news and information instantly, and this can facilitate work, study and personal relationships. However, this potential for immediacy comes with a pitfall, as expectations of response time can be greatly increased. I know this from my own experience; I use email constantly and I tend to reply instantly or at least soon after receiving correspondence, but not all my recipients follow this practice, with the result that I sometimes feel anxious when I do not receive a reply within a time frame which is, to my mind at least, reasonable. With the advent of Blackberries, expectations are certainly raised still further, as workers are expected to answer on the go.

Although email can enhance communication and collaboration, as indicated above, floods of email in users' inboxes can cause them to 'shut down' and ignore or simply forget about individual emails.

Blogs
Assuming that a blogger has managed to build up an audience, I think one of the main affordances of this technology is diversity, i.e. the exposure of the blog to the critical gaze of the 'other'. I know from observing and interviewing my blogger students that if no one comments on your blog, it is difficult to maintain the motivation to keep writing, and actually I feel the same about my own blogs. Well-known technological researchers from the OU have commented on this blog, and that pushes me to investigate concepts further and to strive to achieve a more professional standard of writing.

Of course, blogs also promote reflection, and when reflection and diversity converge, I think the blog is an excellent tool for personal development and learning.

H807-7. Considering disabilities

I'm so pleased this topic is included in our course materials. In all the teacher training courses I've completed up to now, disabilities have never even merited so much as a mention - why is that? I've sometimes wondered over the years how many of our language students are dyslexic (and loads of them seem to have ADD, though I must admit I'm quite sceptical of this particular condition and tend to just think of it as a lack of willingness to concentrate) yet I have absolutely no idea how to recognise dyslexia, and certainly even less idea of any strategies that could help a student to overcome it.

So I've already learned loads just by reading the course notes. In particular, I became aware of these categories of disability:

Personal care: e.g. my cousin who has ALS and a full-time carer
Cognitive: may be able to process text and not images, or vice versa
Unseen: e.g. lupus and anorexia
Dyslexia: manifests itself mainly in reading and spelling difficulties but can also be related to mathematics

It's ironic that I have three people in my family who would qualify as having 'learning disabilities', yet I had never thought of their conditions in these terms before.

I was impressed by the OU's statistics, which show that they attract and support a disproportionately high number of disabled students in comparison with UK higher education as a whole. I'm looking forward to finding out more about how such learners are supported!