Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies

specific purposes. In a recent article on ICT and Science Education, Webb refers to

the origin of the term affordances in Gibson’s theory of the ecology of perception
saying:

Just as in an ecological system in which affordances for a
particular organism depend upon the potential interaction
between organisms and the environment and interactions with
other organisms, so in an ICT-supported learning environment
affordances are provided by interactions between hardware,
software, other resources, teachers and other students.

(Webb, 2005, p. 707)

Again slippage in the use of the term while making use of Gibson’s concept to refer to
the whole learning environment, detracts from crucial educational issues. For
example, to what extent is it possible to speak of “direct perception” when learning is
the issue under consideration? The leap from ideas originating in perceptual
psychology linking perception and action in a non-cognitive relation of organism and
environment to an educational context dependent on interactions between humans, is
at the very least questionable. Moreover, the idea of direct perception is controversial
within psychology. Gregory has long argued, in contrast to Gibson, that perception
involves predicative hypotheses, that knowledge is a prerequisite for perception and
that experience is only indirectly related to external reality (Gregory 1997, 1998).
Laurillard, Stratfold, Luckin, Plowman & Taylor (2000) note that the term affordance
has common currency for „describing characteristics of the learning process’. They
comment approvingly that although the word is borrowed from the psychology of
perception: „it expresses very well the fact that there is an internal relation between

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