This triggered me to contemplate on the relationship between the need and affordance. Most people usually don’t bother to explore the functionality of the device until they have a need for it. There are some people who like to play with all the possibilities afforded by the device. I am not that type. I don’t know my phone has the recording function because I never had the need for it. (I am a practical person in a sense.) Plus, I hate read manuals. Basically I learn the features based on needs.

However, when the need came up, it didn’t occur to me that the phone might have the recording function. The solution I came up with pretty much based on the old/traditional affordances of the device. That means for one, my perceived affordance of the device was rather fixed. Phone is for calling and recorder is for recording. I don’t know the availability of such a function on my phone. How lucky I am to have a friend like Angie. Then the question here is how the manufacturer can help customers like me to be better informed of the new features of the device, especially those features that are not part of their traditional affordances?

I think a video-based walk-through might help. I’d like to watch those video showing me the how-tos  and features of the products.

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.

The author felt that one major advantage of blogs over discussion forum is the affordance for permanence or continuity blogs afford. Unlike the online discussion enabled by Course Management System and confined to particular course, students can continue blogging beyond course. In this sense, the author became against institutional blogging service. The sense of ownership and full control over one’s blogs are critical.

However, this affordance of continuity doesn’t come naturally with weblogs. Based on my experience, students preferred to seperate work from play. Although they have the habit of blogging, they set up a new blogging account just for the school work. In this way, the blog set up for a particular course might be abandoned after the course is finished.