ways this development has arisen as a result of the intensive introduction of new
technologies into education. With the attempt to enhance learning via the use of
technologies, the design of learning has become paramount, in turn demanding
detailed attention to claims made and their presuppositions as well as to the possibility
of generalising results.
The lack of an established paradigm currently has the consequence that one term may
have a variety of different meanings or an idea may be advanced in one area whilst
having been rejected in another. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to this
insufficiency; the way in which concepts common in the literature on learning-
technologies are inadequate for their intended purposes and are based on
epistemological assumptions that are disputed. This paper will aim to indicate how
the study of some of the classical questions of philosophy make some contribution to
overcoming these difficulties.
As a way of accessing these questions, attention here is centred on the concept of
affordance, in particular the function that it is called upon to perform in the
theorisation and investigation of learning with technologies. It is argued that the
concept gives insufficient weight to both knowledge and social practice (Alrechtsen,
Andersen Bodker and Pejterson 2001) and is regularly used in a form that fails to
recognise what is distinctive about human learning. Here, it is not affordances as such
that is of concern but as a concept that provides ready access to the issue of
representation and meaning and therefore a way of raising broader questions
concerning the nature of human learning. In turn this introduces issues which illustrate
the importance of epistemology.