** My Intellectual Flakes **

My mind has evolved on affordance for a while. Since according to my experience and many other study results, the main barrier to educational use of technology is not the technical skills, but the perceived affordance of the tool. It’s not just about using blogs, but also an issue of being comfortable with producing web-based content and sharing with others. This can really be connected to the theme of digital literacy in Henry Jenkins’ blog.

He actually had some problem with the label “digital natives”:

… the “digital natives” analogy implies that these skills are uniformly possessed by all members of this generation; instead, young people have unequal access to the technologies and cultural practices out of which these skills are emerging and so we are facing a
growing participation gap in terms of familiarity with basic tools or core cultural competencies.

So with the uptaking of the participatory culture comes the participatory gap:

the unequal access of youths to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge which will prepare them for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking.

I haven’t have time to delve deep into the affordance.(Someone warned me not to.) I am more interested in the perceived affordance. I sort of have the feeling that it is closely intertwined with cultural and social dimensions. Each might warrant a long and hard investigation.