Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies

a needle).. .users of such tools must keep within certain limits
of manipulation, since they themselves may be cut or pierced.

(Gibson, 1986, pp.40-41)

The idea that an organism’s responses to an environment could operate without
requiring a higher level of cognitive awareness, is central to the idea that meaning is
contained within the environment itself or by virtue of the relation existing between
the organism to its environment (direct perception). The complexity of what is
involved here, for the application of the concept in education, pivots on how we
understand the process of human perception and its relation to meaning. Although
„meaning’, if we can speak about the term in this physical sense, would arise directly
due to the organism/environment relation, Jones argues that Gibson struggles with the
issue of meaningful perceptions, arguing that at points in his work Gibson was in fact
arguing that meaning could be inherent in an object (Jones 2003). Distinguishing his
own view from that of Koffka’s, Gibson argues that whereas in Koffka’s view the
„value of something was assumed to change as the need of the observer changed’ his
own concept affordance had a crucial difference:

The affordance of something does not change as the need of the
observer changes. The observer may or may not perceive or
attend to the affordance, according to his needs but the
affordance, being invariant is always there to be perceived.

(Gibson, 1986, p.139)

The issue of value and hence meaning is the crux of the matter; what meaning is and
how it may be understood in relation to thought, learning and knowledge. This cannot

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