Roy Williams

Hi Steffen, ta.

Hi Roy,
 
you got mail 🙂 And to answer the last open point: I am just following current discussions in philosophy of mind. I still dunno how to put that into praxis in my empirical work, but we will see…

Hi Steffen, I dont have a copy of Gibson’s 1979 text – if it is possible (and easy) please let me have a scanned copy of the relevant pages.
 
Where are you going with Socially Extended Mind?  Sounds fascinating. 
 
I need to focus on getting current software up and running first, but if and when that is done, I want to explore the affordances in the sof[Read more]

Hi Roy,
 
let me put forward two comments:
 
– Yes I know the Costall paper you are mentioning. And I also see that Gibson own position in his writings towards the problem of social negotiation with regard to the affordance concept is, to say the least, ambivalent 🙂  Nevertheless, for me it was helpful to read the passage where he differentiated hi[Read more]

Hi Steffen, thanks for your response.  A few comments:
 
1. My own prejudices:
I feel most at home in ‘ecological psycholgy’. I had my way, I suppose I would close down the Dept. of Cognitive Psycholgy, and the Dept. of Behaviour Psychology, and demand that they merge into a Dept of Ecological Psychology. I suspect that a hypothetical Gibson would be symp[Read more]

Well Roy, I just read your paper and here’s my main comment: At first let me state that I am not very much into what I sometimes call “Pope Exegesis” (refering to people trying to interpret within their scientific papers how the grand old masters of some scientific discourse meant this or that term and who is right in his interpretation – I personly hate[Read more]

Hi Steffan, I recently gave a paper on affordances which included much more on the issue of ‘socializing affordances’.  I looked at a number of papers on affordances in media design, and realised that:
 
i) It doesnt actually make sense to go around calling everything an affordance.
ii) If so, we need to revisit the issue: In short, affordances are a[Read more]

Hi I am working on the Affordance concept in the Context of Media Research. Me and a colleague are at the moment trying to develop social-scientifc methods for reconstructing Media Gadgets’ Affordances from narrative interviews with a methodology strongly relying on Bourdieus Habitus-Concept. From my point of view such a link could help with satisfyingly[Read more]

Sounds very interesting. Are there any links to Billett (or Unwin/ Fuller’s work) that I can follow up?
The work we have done on affordances covers a number of case studies of work-place learners (http://learning-affordances.wikispaces.com/Project+Report) who have come back to education to do a degree. They engage with very different affordances in the[Read more]

Stephen Billett has written on workplace learning. He is in Australia. His approach has been to look at how much workplaces offer affordances for workers to learn and then whether workers choose to take up those affordances. I have found Lorna Unwin and Alison Fuller’s work on expansive learnng environements to have many similarities.

What is Billett’s approach, and how do you apply it to teachers? Just come back from the Networked Learning Conference, where Maarten de Laat presented on some really fascinating work he is doing in Amsterdam with teachers – Etienne Wenger is involved too. They are, as I understand it, enhancing and enabling the weak-linked micro-networks that teachers[Read more]

Have been reading Stephen Billett’s work which discusses affordances for learning in the workplace which is relevant for my PhD study on how new teachers learn in the workplace.

Hi, “Affordances” has had a mixed press, but I have found it essential to my research, because I am working within a theoretical framework based on ecological psychology as well as complexity theory.

So I dusted down my resources on Gibson, and then found a whole range of people who are working on post-Gibsonian, or neo-Gibsonian versions of[Read more]