Affordances

I never really understood what affordances really meant in terms of educational technology until I read Elliott Masie's August 29, 2007 Updates on Learning, Business & Technology (#463). Basically the question he asked was what does the new technology "afford" us to do, especially in these four areas:

• Learning Affordances
• Collaborative Affordances
• Analysis Affordances
• Design Affordances

I just picked up Nintendo's Brain Age 2 and a couple of other games for the Nintendo DS and PSP. I love being able to play games on the go and that's why my fascination of pocket game consoles! Instead of trying to create new games to fit certain learning disciplines, I wonder how one can use these already existing games for different areas such as Math, English, Science, etc. After all, each game requires certain cognitive skills that are essential to learning general academic disciplines, so isn't it possible to replace the game environment with an academic area? As an example, in Brain Age 1, there is already a game to help users improve on the memorization skills by reviewing a list of words and then to recall as many of them as possible within a certain amount of time. Isn't it possible to use the same game to help students improve their vocabulary and adding an extension to obtain definitions of the words? Such technology, if appropriated in the academic settings, will allow us to reap significant affordances!