Affordances and Educational Technologies

Before reading this article I made a point to do a quick search into Web 2.0. Web 2.0 has appeared several times in this class and I have used context clues to determine what it means, however, I felt in necessary to determine a solid definition of Web 2.0 in order to properly understand this article. After brief research on Web 2.0 I came to the understanding that it represented use of the internet beyond the static web pages that were typical in the early days of the internet. In particular, Web 2.0 focuses on the social media aspect and the ability to communicate and collaborate with other people.

                Affordances is another term that I was not very familiar with. Luckily the article explains the term rather thoroughly. To generalize, affordances are not marked by what a technology can do and all of its features, but rather, what the technology allows its users to do. The article goes on to list a number of affordances that Voice Thread allows students to do. The list is quite expansive, and truthfully, I do not completely understand exactly what each affordance means, but I imagine that I will come to greater understand these affordances after using Voice Thread hands on. Overall, the biggest takeaway from this article was a new manner in which to view technology in terms of educational value. The final sentence of the article sums this idea up well, “To ask not what the tool can do, but what their students can do with the tool.”