We are really wanting to look now

we've talked about what a learning

environment is okay

you know this idea of a dynamic ecology

something that Learners could figure for

themselves would also have configured

for them by various institutions that

they may engage with and of course like

technology companies themselves


but still we did not really yet ask this

question of well why why is it that

particular technology it's really

getting incorporated into learning

environments particularly by the

Learners themselves by the users

let's say because also you know teachers

make decisions about why they use

technology too

and

we will start this investigation really

with this lecture today we will be

looking at this notion of affordance and

if you do not know what that word means

yet we will certainly explore it over

the next 20 minutes or so for sure

there is a paper on blackboard which I'm

not telling you to read but it's

recommended reading in other words it'll

help you to read it and help you

understand some of these ideas because

apart from the first page Perhaps it is

quite a straightforward paper with lots

of illustrations even to play a might

seem old they are nevertheless good

examples and this point from Gaver and we

will just run through some of the key

points about what Affordance is and

why it matters


got a nice video of a cute baby as well

it'd be fun okay


and then we're going to do this case

study of the book I hope at least some

of you brought a book because otherwise

this would be a real short class but

we will look at the book as a technology

and if you don't think the book is a

technology by God it is and I will show

you plenty of examples going back 1500

years of the book as something that

developed over this time the book is a

technology that develops it's not

something that was invented all brand

new one day in 710 A.D right something

was like oh everybody we've got books

now we can use the text it's not how it

has we will tell something about this

story and you will look at books you

know we will do this exercise where

we really look at and examine the book

as a way of again as I've said last time

stepping back from the technology and

really asking why is it designed the way

it is

what makes it useful

because this is the key Point things

have to be useful you can invent a

technology pour hundreds of thousands of

dollars or

Yen or whatever into this and

still nobody wants to use it because

it's not useful to you

on the other hand really strange little

things can prove to be useful and we you

know keep them around ourselves for

years and habits develop around them

practices and routines and so on

what we're mainly talking about today

then is this usefulness at an individual

level okay what makes something useful

to you what makes something useful to a

person a user a reader a learner

but much of the rest of the block we

will be talking about this as a more

Collective point so the point that

Technologies are also shaped by various

social forces including politics,

economics,

 decision making, the

practices of Institutions and of groups

and communities themselves 



A thought exercise please don't be

reticent this is not a right answer

style question

A picture of a tree - that's a tree  - we've

all seen trees; they're still around.

what makes a tree useful, potentially.

what can you do with a tree ? You can do

lots of things with trees ? what makes a tree

potentially useful


water

Branches cover from sunshine


 it's a hot

sunny day
 you're

doing a walk I did a really hot walk in

July and it was really hot and we loved

it 

trees shelter 


number one



they produce oxygen yes they eat carbon

dioxide to do it, so yeah; trees as a

whole are extremely useful in that

respect


absorbing water absorbing water


to make furniture yes


fruit if it's the right kind of tree it

could produce. This particular

tree used to stand in my garden but we

cut it down

it had to be cut down because it was

absorbing all of the water it was

absorbing all the water and nothing was

growing so then we cut it down and things started growing

yeah but you can make furniture with it


Habitat For Animals 

yes things live in

it you could climb it if you want to see

things if you're so inclined and so on

and so on and so on 


okay

the point is though

 context matters

and something like a tree

and as we will see shortly you know

something like steps or something like

this room or something like Facebook or

WeChat it's not useful to everybody in

the same way at the same time



okay you know it depends what your needs

are at a given point in time and whether

also you have the capacity to make best

use of that resource


look the tree in the middle there is a

tree that stands outside a school in my

hometown Hebden Bridge and it's

always got something like that on it

and people are constantly decorating it

for whatever particular event is

happening at the moment probably because

kids in the school do it actually

you know so you know the creativity and

the possibilities of Simply decorating a

tree or endless depending on the context

at a particular point in time 

if you

want to make use of that tree to make

furniture

or indeed firewood, nobody mentioned

firewood, but sometimes you need stuff to

burn if you're sitting outside and it's

cold in the middle of the night you know

a tool like the thing on the left the axe

would probably be helpful or a chainsaw

or something anyway

okay

and you know physical capacities or

creatures to make use of it we said

about the living in the trees well

that's a nut hatch I believe on the

right and they can they can do this kind

of thing and it's like wow could you do

that no unless you're Spider-Man we are

not going to be able to do this kind of

thing we cannot make use of that

affordance of a tree as somewhere to

stand

it's basically what he or she is doing




and

you can get very creative with all of

this particularly if you think of the

tree as representing wood there's lots

of things you can do with wood

if you're able to do it but you can't do

everything with with a tree right for

example you can't pick the tree up walk

around with it for a while and then put

it back where you found it

unlike a book

oh so the affordances of a particular

thing that are not infinite

but they are perceived

and this is the important thing

affordances are a combination of

innate capacities of a technology

whatever it is the way that a technology

has been built and designed or or like a

tree, just an object; this doesn't apply

only to you know artificial objects like

Technologies or books but it's you know

it applies to treat and as we'll see in

a minute applies to other features of a

landscape

but also it is a combination between

this notion of how was something

designed what was it designed to do

what can it do innately but also what

capacities can we perceive in it can we

think of new and possibly interesting

and creative ways of using this thing

that we might not have perceived before

and indeed that the designers may not

have perceived we get examples of this will

come up but um

I'm going to show you the video on here

because in theory this should work

better with sound so let's just watch

this video. Its about three minutes it's

pretty good too all right



affordance is a perceptional

relationship between functional

properties of environments and skills of

individual users

the simple design of this chair offers

different affordances to different

individuals

exploring environments and learning

affordances begins very early in life

look at young Bennett

having just learned to walk he is still

learning how his body allows him to

interact with the world around him

for him the chair is climbable

and because of his smaller size it

allows him to hide and crawl beneath it



a young adult like moondazar may not be

able to crawl beneath this chair but for

him it is standable affording him the

possibility of changing a light bulb

For this professor

the chair is sit-able providing a

good resting place for reading

Behavior settings are bounded areas in

space and time and offer multiple

affordances that when perceived support

particular behaviors

this Outdoor Classroom provides an area

that can afford different behaviors

during the day 

this morning while it's empty Bennett is

able to expand his climbing skills

previously learned on the chair he has

read the steps as climbable and is tall

enough to do that on his own

most likely the designers did not

consider this additional use

later that morning a class meets in the

area

the steps that were just climbed upon now

provide great seating for students to

listen to their professor

for the next hour it is easily perceived

as a seminar setting and behaviors

within the space are conducted as such

as the lecture ends it's time for lunch

the area is no longer read as a classroom

but as a social area for everyone to

enjoy each other's company and eat

the young ones have become restless they

run off towards the lawn next to where

everyone is socializing

the kids now enjoy a separate Behavior

setting

one that affords running and exploration

Behavior not appropriate where the

others are eating and talking

if you look closely around you, you will

begin to see how affordance and behavior

settings affect the ways in which we

interact with our surroundings and each

other


affordance and behavior

settings



At this point a behavior setting

- a setting for Behavior - as he said

bounded by place and time

we are in this room

right now a whole lot of things have

come together so that we can be in this

room and I can use it to teach; it

affords the practice of teaching;

it affords certainly the practice of

lecturing

look here I am

and here you are all looking at me

It is no coincidence this is

called a lecture theater

many of you have come from a media

background and you know this idea of

thinking about the appropriateness of a

particular medium some things are

appropriately watched in the theater

like a rock concert for example 

we'd much rather watch a rock concert

live with all the decent noise than I

would on a little screen, on my phone,

or a football match indeed 

 all the seats at a football match

are going towards the pitch because

that's what you want to watch similarly

here we are in a behavior setting which

affords this kind of teaching as we will

see later this is not an ideal room for

the activity that we're going to

try later 

 but I hope you

found and saw the difference with the

tutorial rooms that you were in on

Friday

where it's not necessarily an obvious

front, where you can sit around the table

and it's just smaller;

 it's a smaller and more

intimate Behavior setting it affords

different types of behavior

than is possible in here

and it's not just

the design of the room itself

so in a large and complex,

very complex teaching institution like

the University of Manchester for a start

we need a room booking system


I didn't ask for this room

it's it's tolerable but it's okay I

prefer the other room the Friday room

but you know we had to have a room

looking system that allows

everybody really to know that

educ70141 itself part of a system a code

that identifies this class - this idea of

a class -

and of course in the system. we can book

this room you will know to turn up here

and owe your attendance thing - if it

works - is somehow coded and keyed to the

same system. This technology - the fact that this

this room affords the possibility of

doing two things on different screens

Other rooms do not necessarily, this

one does

and all of these things have been

designed into the system but at the same

time one perceives all of the different

possibilities that are inherent in the

behavior setting as they showed you

there. I don't

think this would be a great place to

have lunch really

its not

very cozy really is it and it's so steep

I worry about falling down these stairs really

you get old

right I mean imagine the baby going up

there we'd all be waiting at the bottom to catch it

but that nice little classroom that

they had there afforded them to eat

their sandwiches; it afforded a bit of

opportunity for play; it afforded a kind

of social intimate classroom setting; it

was in North Carolina State I assume and

I've never actually been to North

Carolina but that's quite a Way South

in America and the weather I assume is

quite nice particularly at certain times

of year unlike in the UK

but anyway you know climate is part of

the whole thing in a in a warmer climate

we would be more likely to have outdoor

classrooms etc etc etc and on we go



the key point then about this idea of

affordance - that something affords

possibility

I mean if you've obviously learned

English and the common use of the word

afford is in terms of cost i.e I

can afford it, I can afford that

restaurant; oh I can't afford that car or

whatever


 but it is all the

same root word it means to make

something possible

and so technologies afford

particular practices and behaviors and

actions; they make them possible

and they are, as I said already, a

combination of what features have been

designed into a technology.

all the things I've just said about the

way that this room has been designed

to afford the practice of lecturing. On

the other hand video conferencing Zoom

that's actually illuminate but same idea;

video conferencing would make it

possible for me to deliver teaching to

people who are not

in the in the room I did my distance

learning tutorials on Thursday night and

we had well people from Kuala based in Kuala

Lumpur and Bangkok various parts of the

UK on the evening and so on and I was at home you know and I

could not have done these things without

the technology but it afforded me the

possibility of remote teaching and of

course it's designed to do that

if not teaching them at least meeting

but it is also about perception and this

this really is a key point

if you don't perceive the affordance of

a technology

you don't notice that it can be used in

a particular way or if you try it and it

doesn't work or if you if you're just

not feeling like there is a particular

need at any point to use a technology

for a purpose that if you

didn't perceive or that it might not

have been designed for then you

would never explore these new

possibilities and of course that happens

a lot you know I'm not saying that

somehow people are deficient if they

don't suddenly find 10 creative uses for

a paper clip every morning

but it is important that this happens

I mean I noticed this with online

teaching one of the differences between

online teaching even online lecturing

and this kind of thing is that

it's very difficult to have a kind of

audible background chat; it's rude, right

it's rude;

I mean you could whisper and get away with

Whispering if you're at the back I'm

sure but you know what I mean if you

were to be heard I'd probably get a bit

annoyed and people would look around and turn

a fair point

so like this room doesn't really

afford this idea of background chat

while the lecture is taking place

you could do it with technology though

you might already be doing it WeChat-ing

each other going 'God why am I

here? the sunshine it's Tuesday morning';

and on Zoom or illuminate or Adobe

Connect or any one of these other video

conferences this is actually quite

possible and actually quite interesting

and having had online lectures and run

plenty of them particularly during the

covid years

you know people using the chat box to

type messages and hold different

conversations can be happening that

supplement

the lecture or the conversation that is

at least taking place audibly using our

speakers and microphones in the zoom

chat

so

while Zoom or these other video

conferencing tools do have certain

similarities and do afford behavior that

is similar to this lecture theater in

other words they do allow me to just

drone on they do allow me to show slides

for example

and I could have run that video I mean I did

this I did this like two years ago

online and it worked fine all right

but it also affords actually different

possibilities it affords this idea of a

background chat it affords the idea of

breakout rooms for example

I mean we'll split into groups

in some ways later on but it

doesn't mean 

suddenly we're all in separate places

right - in zoom you can do that

however there are also things that are

harder on Zoom I can't see everybody's

face

you can't have 85 people using

the chat at once it just be kind of

silly so you know some things are easier

some things are harder

another good example of this by the way

is SMS text messaging



I mean you know I realize SMS text

messaging itself seems a bit outdated

now and we've all moved on to messager or

WhatsApp, WeChat and all these other

things

but nevertheless you know still do

sometimes get an SMS message and of

course there was a time when everybody

was using this technology

but SMS text messaging was not designed

into Mobile phones in order that people

could text each other

it was designed into phones initially so

that Engineers could get

test messages

My Google pixel 6 at the moment

and it sometimes tells me look I need to

do an update

all right probably a couple of days ago

said you haven't updated your phone for

seven days

you just used to get things

that would say sim update or you could

send test messages to them. This is why

SMS messaging was designed into phones

it's originally

and the group that found

that it afforded them possibilities for

using the phone that it had not done so

before were the deaf;

people who are hard of hearing or deaf

couldn't hear phone speakers

realized that what they had with the SMS

text messaging was a way that made the

phone useful to them in a way it had not

been because they found it difficult

to hear so normally the using of the

part of the earphone was was not useful

to them but SMS meant that you could send

messages to people; and they also didn't

need to be able to answer you

immediately 

It's asynchronous rather than

synchronous

again if you're not sure about the

difference check it because it's

important. Synchronous is communication

that both people have to be in the same

place at the same, well at the same time

it's syn- Chronus means same time

Speaking in the same room is synchronous,

a telephone call is synchronous,

Zoom is synchronous,

Asynchronous is not at the same

time so email text messaging Facebook,

teams; these are asynchronous. You can

post a message and have it read five

seconds later or five days later the

messages still there

so

SMS text messaging afforded the deaf a

use of the technology that actually was

both synchronous and asynchronous you

know you're both texting each other at

the same time you know how it is

WhatsApp or whatever you're online and

it might you might as well be having a

text based synchronous conversation but

at the same time if one of you has to

you know break off the conversation

because they've got to go to a class or

have their dinner and come back

to it in half an hour and you're still

going and this was very useful for

the deaf. They started to use it and you

know the practice spread until pretty

quickly really it became something that

the phone companies noticed people were

using and so started charging us for it

anyway part of your plans

so this use of SMS text messaging

evolved over time when we get onto the

book I'll show you some other things

that evolved over time



All right here's another great example

here Lego right

my wife's a big fan of Lego to the

extent that a lot of this stuff is hers

the practices that Lego affords are

becoming infinite there's a show

every year in Manchester they usually

have it in June or

July called Bricktastic I'm always taken

to this because my wife;

well I don't mind there's some of the

things are cool I mean the stuff that

you see in this show is just

extraordinary all the things that you

can do with it. What started out

in about 1950 I think as as a Danish

Carpenter

building these little bricks

and just that was it started there Lego

is Danish for 'let's play' in case you

didn't know.

Well it's from words anyway

and now you can't do almost anything

with this I mean that

Lego figure on the right that's at least five foot tall 


 on the left you know all of these all of

these toys you've got; Lego therapy -

it's possible - people do

this kind of thing 

it's like art therapy



this was a whole exhibition of Lego

where you had

kind of historical scenes that's

supposed to be the

Agora the Democratic Forum of ancient

Greece you the Lego Lego sculptures that

can be really huge this picture

of the people at the top

somebody brought in a bunch

of Lego and we were using it to Think

Through To brainstorm ideas in a meeting

at work it's a few years ago

 the

affordances that people have found for

this basic idea of a plastic brick that

could fit onto another plastic brick in

various different colors is just

extraordinary and by the way if you ever

want to win a bet with a trivia question

the answer to the question which company

in the world makes the most tires

okay for cars its not dunlop

 Goodyear it is Lego

okay this is true Lego makes more tires

by number than any other company in the

world for its little vehicles true fact



I said I would talk about Gavers point

Gaver starts with this with this

exploration of affordances

It's a key point that this applies

to really every everyday Technologies

like door handles 

okay that's a bit

cruel that one but hey

funny cartoon anyway I think right

totally you know somebody's completely

failed to notice that the door handle

that you pull is not the same 

I've seen

people struggling with that door at the

back because you haven't noticed that

there's a button right but not on that

door. Like that door has a

button, that you can push.

Look at the handle on on the screen

there - you would pull that;

that's not a design that affords pushing

it's a design that affords pulling but

similarly if the handle is just like you

see there, nobody would try to pull that

door

well seriously

The simple thing

about that door is that you look at it

and you go 'right that's got to be pushed'.

This is all in Gaver's paper, so

have a look.

Some of you've got Apples some of you've

got PCs but the basic idea of a scroll

bar remains the same.

If you've got what looks like a

button on the screen, it's not an actual

button,

not a button like I have here; you're not

actually pressing it what you're doing

is clicking on your mouse button

and the software,

the interface, translates this notion

that a click on the mouse button means

whatever's under the cursor do

something with it. If that thing looks

like a button, then a button on screen

affords it's pressing

but it doesn't afford clicking and

dragging for instance it's like a scroll

bar does

A scroll bar - we're all familiar

with the idea now that it means that

there's something above and below where

we already were so we can scroll up and

down by clicking and dragging on the

scroll bar, or of course for Mac users

using your two fingers on the mousepad.

I'm one of the 10 percent

that does it my way where you scroll

down and it goes up or are you one of the

90 who really confuse me who've got it so

you're moving down. Why would you have

it that way round ? I just don't

understand it because 

I feel differently I feel like that's

more useful than the other way around

but all of these things

are becoming conventions that we are

familiar with but they're all based on

this familiar idea of

pushing, pulling, clicking, dragging.

Our hand movements are translated

into things on the screen.

There's plenty in that paper

If you wanted to make use of the

affordance of a tree to build furniture

and you needed to have some

kind of ax or chainsaw not to mention

you know a sawmill probably and lots of

other Technologies along the way - hammer

and chisel and nails and so on; but

nevertheless you could turn a tree into

a chair eventually

if you had all the necessary tools and

you had all the necessary awareness of

how to link all of these possibilities

and these affordances in a chain.

You want to get a

response from that button you clicked

you want to see something like

that - you click on

update and this is my WordPress blog;

one of them anyway; you click on update

and it turns to updating and that's good

because that feels like 'oh yeah I

actually have done something'. You

get little clicks on your

phone sometimes or when I'm putting my PIN number

into a cash machine 

you get a little bleep sometimes but not

always and then I'm not always happy if

I don't get the bleep or you need to

see the little asterisks when you're putting

in your password or your PIN number

so you know if have you put in 

enough characters. All of these things

help; they matter.

They make this digital interface easier

to use they afford these possibilities.

If you take these

ideas more broadly, and thinking about

the design of educational technologies

more broadly and what makes them useful

these little things can just

be the helpful things sometimes.

If you don't get a response of any kind

you wonder whether you've actually done

what you thought you were supposed to be

doing and I'm sure I'm not the only one

who'd click on it about five

more times and then you realize that 

you 

bought something five times; that's why

it says never press refresh while

you're doing this.

Affordances can be tasted and

smelt.

On the left you get a good meal 

Milk smells bad when

it goes off because

our body is saying 'oh no don't drink

that - full of bacteria, nasty thing'. Rotten

meat smells awful so you don't eat it.

If you get a cake that

comes out of the oven looking like that
 
you've done something wrong. This is

feedback; this is an early illustration

of what feedback is - your cake

comes out the oven looking like that and you

did something wrong and it's trying to

tell you this. So food and it's

texture and it's taste and its

smell all of these things are part of it

and all of these things help us build up

a picture of the resources around us in

the environment and which ones are

attractive and useful to us, and which

ones are not. This applies to

technology just as it does with anything else.

You might not smell the affordances of

Technology

If these phones were just that little

bit bigger they wouldn't fit in our

pockets. I know women

pockets are not designed into your

clothes often enough. My wife is always

complaining about this thing.

I can put my

phone in my pocket; if it's a bit bigger

I couldn't; if it was smaller

I would struggle to see it.

It's got to be a certain size

for me to be able to read it and use it,

so there's a kind of optimum

size for technology sometimes and 

all of these things are important.

Good design therefore...

Good design of educational environments;

good design of Technologies generally;

good design of just about anything.

It's not just about the content,

it's not just about adding functionality

upon functionality, it is about how well

the users perceive a particular resource

to be useful to them.

Is it useful ? Can I make use of this ? Can I

make use of this without spending six

hours to learn to do something that it's 

just going to take me 20 minutes.

Can I learn to do something quickly

and easily ? Do I see how I

can make use of this tool ?

What I'm going to do

is start to talk about books.

I'm going to just show you

this quick film now.

I'm going to show you some examples 

from books. I said the book was a

technology

and the book is very definitely a

technology. It is a technology that

people have adapted and learned to make

and to use in various different ways

over the years and I will talk about

some of this.




Okay we laugh and they are taking the

Mickey slightly but some of the things

that they were talking about are

actually extreme shrewd.

I got interested in the medieval book.

I think it is interesting

to look at the ways that information

practice is evident in the ways that

these books were made and particularly

the ways they were used 

What you have

to realize is that 

books were a technology that people had

to learn to make and had to learn to use

and had to learn to make them in ways

that were economical and effective that

 transmitted the information

from from book to book. When you were

handwriting books - before print -

books would be written by hand.

This is a complicated process that

involved lots of stages. These

monks; they didn't go down

to the nearest shop with their five

groats and buy a nice blank book so

they could come home and start writing

like we might do now. For a start you

had to make the book from scratch. 

Books were made of parchment

not paper. Do you know what parchment

actually is ?

No - it's not made of wood,

parchment, that's skin, calf skin usually.

So you had to skin the

calf, you had to tan it, you had to 

treat it, you had to stretch it. This

was expensive stuff and it

couldn't be wasted. So

parchment was often used and reused and

some very famous scripts, some very

famous texts, actually only exist

sometimes as bindings for other books.

They were found because the

parchment had been reused

 to bind another book. So the ink would be scraped

off and written on again and again.

Really expensive and prestigious books

like the Lindisfarne Gospels; the Lindisfied Gospels is a very

very beautiful book, huge book as well,

and this was made of unborn calf vellum.

How you go about getting the the skin of

an unborn calf I don't even really want

to think about it; but that's the

softest and most prestigious material.

Parchment is expensive and

valuable

and of course it took

a lot of time to copy a book.

New books appeared

during the Medieval Era but it

was very rare for somebody to actually

sit down and write a book

in the way that I might do it

to some extent. Even the books

that I've written, I've still needed 

a technological device and a

printer and a publisher and an

editor and a proofreader

but an author of a book in the

Medieval Era might might have written it -

there were some people who did both jobs.

Usually you would be dictating it

then the author would be or

 a scribe would write down

the words of a famous speaker or a

book that you see here. The technical

term for a book that we might use now is

is actually a codex. So a

single codex or book might have various

different texts in it. It might be a

compilation because again parchment was

expensive - libraries, there wasn't a lot

of space in them

and were books were heavy and

expensive and difficult to carry around

particularly if they were over a certain

size. So a single codex might contain

many different texts,

and you had to find your way around this

This is an amazing

book;

 this is called the Mac Durnan Gospels.

This book I saw last summer;

this book was created in about 750

A.D

So that makes it about 1 300 years

old and it was beautiful, it's a lovely book. For

a start what you will see in the writing,

it's all in Latin,

but for a start 

it's not very big. You can see the size

of the finger there, but there is a lot

of space around that.

Now I've already said parchment

was really expensive and valuable so why

leave all this Blank Space ?

What you see there was probably

written anything up to 100 to 200 years

after that

Not just two years but possibly

centuries after okay and that those are

marginal notes;

it's 

what's called a gloss.

It's a commentary.


You see the blue and red letters there

you see the blue letter; you see

below it there's a little note between

the two lines;

people used to 

do this kind of thing and still do.

You're not supposed to do it

technically the library should tell you

off if you're writing in books but I've

done it all the time. I like reading

other people's notes as well, I think

it's great.

Seriously I like seeing what other

people thought was interesting and this

is partly the point here. Do you see the

little hand ?

You see the little hand at the top

between the two columns this is somebody

going 'Look here ! Look at this thing !''

seriously it's called a

diaper (sp ??)

and it's what people used to do.

People learned to do this kind of thing,

so not only did it become

acceptable to put this little thing on

and say "I'm telling you what's

interesting here; I'm giving you a

commentary, an annotation of this bit of

learning";

but you had to be able to read that 

and this is this idea of developing

what I would now call information

literacy or a technological literacy.

People became familiar with

the signs and the symbols that said 'look

here's something interesting'. This

scholarship that developed over time

and these various different ways that

people introduced 

telling somebody else what's interesting

in the book - what's useful about this

book - to make it useful.

People when they first wrote things down

because

so few people could read -

publishing a book was not

something done so people could put their

feet up at the end of a hard day's

slaving in the brewery or

whatever of the monastery and go 'oh yeah,

the latest novel from the

venerable bead is out'. You didn't

do that kind of thing. Books were there

to transmit information. If you

couldn't really read,

certainly there were very, 

very few people who read books out loud,

except in prayer which is different.

You didn't need spaces

between the words, a lot of early books

don't have spaces between the word

because you didn't need them.

But as more and more people

started to do that, you've got spaces

between the words you can see.

Here the spaces are marked with

little dots and some of these are

really not they're just abbreviations so

people had to learn the abbreviations as

well.

People annotated books

for all sorts of reasons

This is a book of hours, a 'Book of

Hours' is like a religious prayer book

but not for priests. A Book of Hours is

the kind of thing that you would carry

around with you if you were a noble or a

you know a lord; it's like a status symbol.

It was like a filofax for the 80s or you know

your posh phone - you

should have a Book of Hours, and a Book

of Hours basically gave you the

prayers that you were supposed to say at

particular times of day hence 'the book

of hours'. It would also give

you a 

calendar; what you're seeing here is the

calendar at the front of the book.

Thinking about all of the 

ways in which a book like this is made

useful to people;

you had to be able to find your way

around these prayers, if you just simply

got a book full of prayers - 

big deal - the point was to help you work

out which prayers you should be saying

at which particular times of day and

indeed which days of the year. So you

would have a calendar at the front of

the Book of Hours, which this is. 

Those initials you see there are the

names of the days of the week.

Some of them are in red because the

red days are special days; they are feast

days,

or festivals, or Saints days - hence the

phrase in English 'Red Letter Day'.

If you have heard this phrase 'a red letter

day', it is an important and prestigious day

or sometimes a

dangerous day - a significant day.

It comes from this phrase.

This book of ours was owned by King

Richard III.

As in Shakespeare Richard

III was supposed to be a sort of evil

King. If you

think that the British royal family has

been this sort of unbroken progression

by the way for hundreds of years leading

to, as he is now, King Charles III -

that's not true. Kings were

slaughtered and bumped off and

imprisoned in castles and starved

to death and killed with red hot pokers

and stuff like that, trust me. King

Richard III was I believe the last

English king to die in battle leading

his troops in 1483. Anyway he was

considered something of an evil chap but

perhaps his reputation was undeserved

and anyway Shakespeare wrote about him.

This was King Richard III's Book of Hours.

That writing that you see there

says in Latin "on this day he was born

King Richard III in Fotheringay in

Yorkshire".

I think Richard III has written his

birthday in his diary - I love it. He's got

his calendar and he said it's my

birthday, I'm writing my birthday: this is

actually what it is.

So you can annotate

books, you can write on them, you can

personalize them, you can have some

really quite remarkably beautiful

illustrations like that one;

I'll come back to that table of

contents in a minute 

So in

all of this Blank Space which people

might have written their notes in and

stuff like that

now I would not have known what that was

had not professor Michelle Brown,

who taught us, and really did know

absolutely everything about everything

that had happened in Europe before about

1400 - and I mean everything. 

So she explained what these were;

these are the gospels, like I said,

Mac Durnan Gospels. I am no

Christian expert here but the four

gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John;

a lot of them are sort of telling

four versions of the same story.

They're like reboots or remakes

of Christ's

story.

So some tales

like, the feeding of the

five thousand - some of them

appear in more than one gospel.

Some of them appear in

only one gospel, some of them appear in

all of them, some of them appear in maybe

two or three of them.  What you see

here is a medieval - actually not

even medieval, this is this is like 750

A.D; this is a cross reference,

it's like a footnote.

So this whole idea of the academic

footnote starts here.

What this is actually if you look at

the top box;

we must be looking at John here

because what you see at the top, well

the little number two at the top you see

it looks like an 'm' and a 't' with a line

over it and then an 'l'.

The 'M' and the 't' is Matthew

the 'L' is the Roman numeral 50:

verse 50 of Matthew

or chapter 50 of Matthew.

Similarly mark

chapter 41. Luke chapter 56.

The same story that

we are looking at here,

the same bit of the Gospel is

cross-referenced to say this also

appears

in Matthew chapter 50, Mark chapter 41 and

Luke chapter 61.



People wanted to find their way around

things

and

what you see here

is one of the one of

the earliest tables of contents

that existed. 

How we use information is something else

that has evolved over time and it

evolved for these guys too. We are

talking hundreds of years here

but over a long period of time

scholarship changed.

When the Mac Durnan Gospels

was written - and pretty much throughout human history up

until about 1000, towards the end of the

11th century - so about 1080 I

think first University was founded, but

until there were any Universities people

did their scholarship in monasteries.

That's what you did, you were a

monk.

You might have

I suppose had a non-religious

outlook but if you wanted access to the

knowledge of the world you needed to at

least profess a religious outlook and

get into a monastery one way or the

other. The way that people used to

study these great works is that they

would they would do what's literally

called 'Meditatio',

which is from where we get the word

'meditation'. The Latin word for a

particular style of learning and it

really did me to sit and engage yourself

with one book for a very long period of

time. You would study that book in its

immensity. Everything about it;

you would meditate on that one book.



Things changed when the universities

began to the first University in the

world ? does anybody know ? and it's not Britain

we were second.

It is Italy; the University of

Bologna in Italy is the world's oldest

surviving University. 1080 I think. Oxford

is second, about 11 something.

When these universities opened the

style of scholarship changed, you instead

of looking at one book for a long period

of time, you did pretty much what we're

asking you to do now which is look at a

lot of them; synthesize

knowledge from a number of different

books

and this was called 'lectio'.

It's the origin of

modern scholasticism. The point is that

you needed therefore to get access to

the information in that book more

quickly than you did before.

To simply have worked through

the entirety of the book hoping that you

know eventually you would find the bit

you wanted because that is what you were

doing; you were here to spend a year

reading this book. You didn't

need instant access to information

unless

in the past you were a priest - which is

why you had that cross-reference earlier

because if you wanted to put together

your sermon, you wanted to find

out who did all the different stories in

the gospels were which is part of this.

Once you get to the stage where

you're looking at lots of different

books, you need information quickly.

This table of contents, which is what it

is,

was added to that book about 200

years after that book was first written.

Somebody wrote out a table of contents

and bound it into the book up front,

whereas previously there hadn't

been one because they decided that the

table of contents would make that book

more useful; it is

as simple as that.

A way of navigating around the

information that is within this book.

Illustrations like this, which is another

Book of Hours; in fact it might even be

Richard the third's Book of Hours again.



Also bearing in mind that a lot of

people couldn't read.

They

might not be completely illiterate but

they would struggle. Images helped and

what you actually have here is

pictures; firstly you've got

Capricorn on the right hand side right -

that's Capricorn, so that's a zodiacal

sign saying this is the sign of the

zodiac for this month. What should you do

when it's Capricorn ? You

should Slaughter your Hogs;

kill those pigs man, brine them, preserve them,

salt them; get on with it. Little

pictures would guide people through the

story.  Illustrations developed to

help people who couldn't read. I showed

you Mappa Mundi;

similar idea, all of the

illustrations and the text on the map

working together to help guide people

who could not read. So illustration, it's

not just something that makes a book look

pretty

but it's something that might help you

understand the information within it and

navigate your way through it.




Early musical notation


It's time to take just a couple of

minutes. We will begin this task of

looking at books. So 

get your books out, if you've got books

get them out.



Just to sum up some of the

things that were just saying just now

and some of the things that come out of

the video. So that's that picture of the

table of contents again. We laugh

at the two Norwegian monks for saying 'oh

I need a guide to the other book. How do

I use this book I have to have a guide

to it' but this is actually what this is.

This is a real life example of

a guide for the user, it's what a table

of contents is.



None of these things are unique and

innate to the book.

I am hoping they're in the room

there will be books that have page

numbers and books that do not.

There will be books that have page

numbers but don't need them.

Think about this, just hold these

thoughts in your mind.

Do you need page numbers in every book

that has page numbers ? Most of these

books didn't have page number;

page numbers were pretty late to

development.

Alphabetization, alphabetical order - 

most of you are Chinese, you don't have

an alphabet;

well you don't, you have script - it's different.

You don't have an alphabet. I have no

idea how you arrange things in your

dictionaries but I must be certainly not

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Etc.

The alphabet is a completely arbitrary

order,

why is the alphabet in the order that it

is ?

I don't know.

The alphabet is a completely random

order of stuff right but it is an order

that we are all familiar with largely.

The alphabet is not an order that is

somehow natural or innate

or correct.



It is an order that has developed over a

long period of time and the first

scribes who used it; the first recorded book to be

created in what you might call

alphabetical order

came in about 1100.

It was such a new and radical thing

that when subsequent people copied it

they didn't understand the point of that

alphabetical order so they didn't copy

the order and it was lost again for a

while before it's kind of came back in

about 1200, 1300s. People didn't want

things in alphabetical order in the past

they wanted things in logical order

right or chronological order. Like the Bible, at least the Old

Testament is in essence in

chronological order. Genesis, Exodus, the

other ones, Leviticus;

this is the story of the Jews

essentially in chronological order.

People would discuss things in logical

order. If you 

used alphabetical order you were seen as

a bit of an ignoramus

because you were seen as some as

admitting to everyone else that you

didn't understand the logical structure

of the argument and points that you were

making

so putting everything in alphabetical

order was seen as somehow ignorant

because it was a cop-out and you 

didn't have to think about the logical

order of things you could do in

alphabetical order. Now we use it;

now we're familiar with it; some of your

books will be I'm assuming in

alphabetical order, I know what a mine is

anyway.




Please, please to really try to take this

task seriously. Don't just have a

cursory look

at the book - 'oh yeah, it's a book, put it

down and do WeChat for the next 20

minutes'. 

I've got three that I'm just going

to hand out. Please really

consider this task seriously. Look at the

affordances of the different books that

you have;

there are really if you like two

different types of affordances going on

here.

Firstly


look at all of the books as a set -

because if I'd asked

you to bring in a scroll

or bring in you know bring in a phone

or a TV - this is a different medium, the

book. All of these books have certain

things in common

that's why we call them Books. So

think about firstly what is the

affordance of every book. What does every

book have ?

What kind of behaviors does it make

possible ? What can you do with these

books that you can't do with certain

other file formats ? and if you're not

thinking of anything now, talk to people

in the room about this; look at the book,

feel the book, consider the book,

reflect on the book; what behaviors does

a book make possible ? What can you do

with a book ?

All books - there are things that

every book in the room has in common

with every other book that are innate to

it as a file format, if you like;

but then have a thing about the

different types of book that are in the

room.



I mean if we if you end up in a in an

area where everybody's brought a novel

then use one of mine to look at

a different type of book. Think

about the different types of book there

whether they're in Chinese or

English or Javanese or whatever.

Think about the different types of book

and how these books are made useful to

you,

as a user of the information that is in

that book.

Every one of these books will be

helping you navigate your way around

this.

So look at the book; talk to each

other about books 





I am going to pass out three books and I

want these back, particularly Watchmen,

this is one of the greatest books ever

written by the way but it's unusual you

will see why.

So please really look at books,

really feel them, think about them; look

at the ways that information is

organized in them. Step back and think 'is

this book useful to me and why ?' okay not

because of the content of the book

because of the way it's designed.



What is

similar to all of these books and

what is particular to different

types of books ? and if you really feel

that you've had enough of the books that

you've got swap them around - 

circulate the books. There are many

different types of book in the room; move them around, swap them,

look at different types of books;

look at lots of different types of books

this is a very active task.

Talk to each other; try to use the book,

so for example how would you find something 



There

are two different ways that you could

use the information in that book.

If I wanted to say to you 'how would you get

from a particular place guys'; if you want to

find a particular Street, there it is.



so I think that's a great novel right

that is a great novel right but what's

unusual about it - it has pictures, it is a graphic novel

There is lots of different types of information in a book;

it does not have to be words.


Think about the ways that you might make

a book more useful to yourself.

Books on screens do not count.

we are looking at paper books.

Think about a book which is not designed to be read from start to finish.
 

Where's my Metro book ? look at the maps in that book

talk to

each other about those. What about the

maps in that book ? Are they easy

to use ? why are they easy to use ? why

isn't metro map easy to use ? okay

Metro maps are not like normal Maps they

are different okay.

what helps you use

that book ?

Talk about how you would use a book, how

do you read a book ? how do you find where

you were finishing the book the night

before. 


If you did that task

actively you should have access to some

of these questions or at least opinions

about them. So what is common to all of

these books ? Really let's just start with

the basics, what is shared by every book

in this room ?

They are sources of information.

Think of this as a file format, but

it is a file format that has particular

features. For a start a

book can be open or closed;

this matters - 

a book can be open or closed so what

does every book have that allows you to

close it for example ?

A cover.

Look at your book covers does anybody

have any books with a completely blank

cover.

I am serious there will be some.

Right you have one, that is a library

book. There's one

they are probably blank for two one of

two reasons; one is that they will have

been rebound by the library at some

point and/or they will have

had a dust jacket that has been lost.

I'm going to show you a film 

and you'll see an example of this.

What is common to all the

others is that the covers are not blank;

there are things written on the cover. so

what is on the cover of these books ?

The title, 

the author,

publication information,

on the back there will probably be a

blurb or an abstract of the book.

Why are these things there ?

Why put that information on the book ?

To attract people to buy it

to also help them decide whether they

want to get it off the library shelf and 

whether it's worth their time. It's an

abstract - it's a summary of the book

Some of the books have

information on them to make it more

useful. I will show you the examples of

this that I put on my little film.

Books also have another thing in common

they don't just have a cover - what's

inside the book physically ?

Not words, physically; what is it made

of ? what is a book comprised of ?

What do these books have ? Pages. 

They have Pages - a book is made of a

number of pages.

These medieval

books that we were looking at...

you don't 

chop up a skin - a parchment - into

these pages and then file them

individually; you fold 

the parchment and you create what's

called a 'choir'.

A choir

is a number of sheets usually eight; you

then cut them and you fold them and you

bind them separately inside the books.

Different choirs were often given to

different scribes and one of the ways

that medieval Scholars worked out who

wrote what is by looking at whether the

handwriting changes and often you see

books where every eight pages the

handwriting changes because they farmed

out the job of writing it to several

different scribes and each one of them

got a choir. So the idea of a page

is something that's developed over time

but is not necessarily natural.

People didn't used to number pages

but you can do various things with every

book simply because it's created in

part of pages. How do you know where to pick up a

book again that you had to finish the

night before, to go to sleep ?

So we asked the question does

every book need page numbers ?

okay, some of you had novels,

right; does a novel really

need page numbers ?

Okay someone said yeah; there's no right answer or

wrong answer. You would 

 remember the page number where

you were.

I wouldn't have a slightest idea

what page number I was on, I would put a

bookmark in.

okay but you can do that with a book

okay you can get a little bookmark; never,

never turn the corners over I might

write in books but turning the corners

over that's immediate death, okay,

execution. Put a bookmark in

and you know where you were.

You can do that with a book so it's

really easier to do that with a book

than it is with a computer; like I know now

that

our computers will open up files where

we were before but you know this doesn't

always make it easy to jump between

books - to move

constantly from one part of a file to

another part of a file, it's actually

easier to do that.

So we can put bookmarks in and look

why are we saying that novels don't

necessarily need page numbers - because

how is a novel read; how do you typically

read a novel

Do you start

halfway through ?

You would start to finish right.

There are plenty of books in this

room that are designed to be read from

start to finish.

But there are lots of types of books in

this room that are not designed to be

read from start to finish. 

So we've got study skills books; a textbook;

the Bible; a dictionary

Let's take the

dictionary. We have a dictionary here;

German-Spanish.

What's the Spanish word for 'fenster' - tell

me how you would find that

in the book that's not alphabetical ?

 so we

have a dictionary phrase book;

now I just asked Claudia a question here

because I thought it was

organized alphabetically -

Fenster is a German word for window.

I thought you were going to be able to

look and go to F right

but that is organized by

category not alphabetically so

maybe it's less useful for a query like

that but maybe it's more useful if you

want to actually go to Spain and order a

beer or get a hotel. So

it's a phrase book rather than the

dictionary. Does anybody have a book that

is organized alphabetically ?

There is a system

in the book; the book is not just a

random series of words right, it is not

just a random series of concepts or

events.

It is an organized structure of

finding the information that is in this.

Dragging this back to

educational digital Technologies for a

moment I hope that you at least find my

Blackboard site reasonably okay to

navigate. I hope that you can at

least follow the chronology of the weeks 

and the blocks; it's

arranged in chronological order, my site,

that's the way it is. There is a

top level of the hierarchy that is the

blocks and then within each block there

are the weeks and that's how it is.

So there is an organizational system in

place here. Claudia's dictionary

or phrase book is organized

categorically; by category but not

by alphabet some of you've got a book

that is organized by alphabet. 

Now not all of the

information in these books either is

textual there are plenty of books here

with illustrations of various kinds - even

that textbook has illustrations in it.

They've got pictures and diagrams, graphs, charts and so on.

Watchmen, that book really is one of

the greatest novels ever written and if

you've never read it or even seen the

movie you really should; although the

movie's got one really grim bit in it I

can't watch - when you see the

guy walking up with a chainsaw my advice

is close your eyes for 10 seconds.

What is unusual about that book

but in terms of it being a novel ?

That is a graphic novel; that novel is

told mostly by pictures, not all of it

though.

If you flick through that

you will see that there are some

passages of the book that are

text, they're words okay. There's one

reason why it's such a good book really

it is a work of Genius.

You had the history of

comic books up there. Are there any other

books where

the visual is important ?

It's a comic; a manga.

Are there any photo books

for instance or books of pictures.

We had Lord of the Rings;

Peter Rabbit, Beatrix

Potter's illustrations.

Lord of the Rings has lots of maps.

Lord of the Rings is interesting because

Lord of the Rings is one of the very,

very few novels I have ever encountered

that has an index.

At the end of volume three of Lord

of the Rings there is an index; I assume

they still print the index in the modern

volumes. I hope they do.

But most of the time you don't

need to find your way through a novel

because you're doing it from start to

finish but if you've got a book that you

need to jump into it

matters.

So we've got a phrase book here but

one that has organized partly around

pictures and so on - that's quite

interesting.

Textbooks; chapters in books if

you're not planning to read the whole of

an academic book but you just want to

know one chapter there are different

ways of finding it.

You would find it by looking at the

table of contents

but you might also look at the back

where there's an index.

Now what is the difference between a

table of contents and an index ?

There are differences.

An academic book or a

reference book - 

does it have both a table of contents at

the front

and an index at the back ? Yes.

If I want you to find

what page does chapter five begin on

which one of the two would you look at ?

The table of contents.

If I was to ask you which page does the

idea of post-modernism appear on ? Index.

Two different 

pointers to the same

information.

The A to Z of Manchester; the Manchester guide

book.

This is pretty old-fashioned, nobody

uses these anymore.

This is a road

map of the whole of Manchester.

You would

Google Map now

but this is an atlas; think of this

as an atlas. I will bet you every Atlas

still looks like this; I've got atlases

at home because they're too big so I didn't

bring them in. If I want to

find the information in here I would do

it in two different ways depending on

how I was going to use it.

At the front there is

a kind of summary of all of the pages. So

if I want to go from

this bit of Manchester - which is kind of

Bolton - and say I wanted to go from

Bolton to Rochdale. Bolton is

there and Rochdale is there. 

If I wanted to do that drive I would

know that Bolton's 

page 32 to 33 and Rochdale's 

pages 26 to 27 and I can turn to 

Bolton. If I wanted to do the journey using

this book that's how I would start.

But if I wanted to find a

particular street;

say I wanted to find the very wonderfully

known Whitworth Street, which is of

course named after me. Whitworth close -

that's grid reference 1A - page 100. 

What I'm looking at now is

the gazetteer at the back. This is

an alphabetical index to all of the

streets that appear in this Atlas.

This would be absolutely no use to

me if I wanted to drive from Bolton to

Rochdale.

If I want to find a specific Street

in Rochdale or Ashton or wherever, I've

got another index - I've got another way

of organizing the material. So I've got

page 100 1A. Here the page

numbers are really important.

Page

one hundred, row one, column A.

There is a system for pointing me

to the right information in this book

and if I want to find a particular

street it's much easier to do it through

the index at the back than the table of

contents at the front.

But if I want to find

more general information - in this case

how to do a broader journey I would

probably go to the map at the front or

you would find

the chapter that you needed from this

book at the front.

Different ways of organizing the

information to point people to the right

direction.

I've got one more film to show you

but we'll finish off with this because

um when it was covered year, I

couldn't do this class I got my son to

put this together his camera work is a

bit odd at times and there are points

when you're kind of looking at my hands

rather than me.

Some points to summarize what

we've been talking about here okay:


Hello

everybody

in this film I want to give you an

introduction to a very familiar 

technology. Indeed it's so familiar that

you might not even think it is a technology.

But it's been around for

hundreds of years and despite frequent

claims that we will soon not see them any more 

many

more millions of these are still made

every year. It is the book.

I want to think about some

features of the book as a file format,

if you like. I want to talk about things

that books have in common and I want

you to think of and remember the idea of

affordance.

The idea that people use Technologies because 

they are useful. So let's ask what makes

a book useful

obviously books come in all different

sizes. I've got three here ranging from

this booklet

which has thirty two pages;

this short novel which is

169 pages;

and then probably the biggest single book I

have Stephen King's The Stand about 

1325 pages.

The thing is though

as soon as you look at a book you know

how long it's going to take you to read

no one is going to pick up The Stand and

imagine they're going to finish it in

two days. This is one of my

favorite novels I bought this copy of

one flow Over the Cuckoo's Nest at a gas

station in Pennsylvania USA in 1989 and

I'm sure I paid about $2.50 for it.

It is battered 

but it's still very readable; it is not a file format 

which is going to go obsolete overnight.

I must have read this novel over 20 times for my $2.50.

That is good value. Talking about durability, this 

is the oldest book I own; at the bottom

of the front page here you can see

it's printed

1751 I believe that is

still

quite readable, there's some beautiful

pictures even if it does print f's instead of s's

so a little 

old-fashioned but we can still use it.

Now, let me ask you - 

would you do this with your laptop ?

Then again I wouldn't get 

into a bath full of water but then again


Books are heavy

particularly when you've got a lot of

them; they take a lot of storage space

too

The have developed over time some 

adaptations to the file format;

you can see how these books have their

important summary information, the

author and the title, on the spine that's

on display 

when the books are stored on these

shelves.

That is an important point, 

I bet even that book that

doesn't have anything on the cover has

something on the spine

so you can store them like this

If you had no information on

the spine and all the information was on

the cover, if you were to find the books

on the shelves you'd have to display

them with their covers out. This would be

highly inefficient; much less efficient

than doing it like this.  This is why 

books have this on the cover

and yes I

do like Stephen King I think he's a

remarkably good author actually and 

highly underrated but once you

get a really famous author you will

generally see that their their names on

the cover-up are the big thing 

because you want to read a Stephen

King book, you don't care what it's

called. When nobody's heard of you like Andrew

Whitworth's books don't have Whitworth in

big letters on the spine, trust me;

because nobody cares about who

wrote that book. But these are 

the different ways that you have of

advertising and marketing and displaying

the book.

Going back to my 1751 book, there is very little

on the cover and spine. This gives you an indication

that it has been rebound.

Usually with newer books you will see pictures

on the cover with the names of the author intended

to make us want to buy it because we liked their previous work.


On this

particular book it comes on what's called a

dust jacket which protects the

cover of the book by itself, as you can see

it's getting a little tatty.

Paperback books will usually now have

information on the back. You call this a

blurb or like an abstract and the idea

is that you can find out what's inside

the book without paying to go through it

and this makes it look far more useful.

So that's the outside of the book taken

care of

now let's look inside the book.

What can you

do with the features of this technology

to make the book more useful to you ?

For a start, regardless of whether the

contents of a book are divided up into

chapters, every book is of course divided

up simply by the fact it has

pages

this allows several other ways to make

them useful. For a start, the reader can put a 

bookmark in between two pages so they know

exactly how far they read to last time.

You can number the pages - this is very

common

and numbering the pages allows you

to let the reader know how the book is

divided chapters. You could put

a table of contents with page numbers

and you can also let them know where

particular subjects are discussed inside a

book by including an index.

Not every book needs this kind of

arrangement and sometimes books are

arranged differently as I will show you

shortly. You can argue for instance that if

you do have a novel the page numbers are

essentially irrelevant because it

doesn't really matter what page

particular things happen on but I'm

going to get you to think about this

kind of thing in the related task - how do

your books organize the information

within them ? There different ways to

organize information. Dictionaries will

do it alphabetically; travel guides like

these will organize themselves

regionally both in terms of the whole

series and the way that the advice

within them is divided up region by

region of these different countries so

they are organized around a geographical formation.

Atlases are arranged geographically;

the front of each map to show you

exactly how each map relates to the maps

on different pages the information being

remained geographically.

The atlas is also an example of the book

that contains far more than just text.

This is a very famous graphic novel

told mostly by pictures and speach bubbles 

and also if I can find one

passages and text like that; the book can

show a lot of different types of

information. There are also certain limits

to books. So of course the book

can never answer your questions if the

information within it changes; the

book update itself.

Remember that idea right

there are points about all of

these different media that apply

generally. You've got this idea 

you are able to interact with the content of

the book

right in various different ways. Now some

of your books will have things,

particularly the textbooks, I imagine

 where it

says stop and think.

I have done this on blackboard you;

you go through the Blackboard site

and things are organized there will be

particular points where I'm saying 

'think about this' okay. Partly it is the

equivalent for the distance Learners of

things that we're doing in our class.

As we move on and you will see this in

block three, when I talk about pedagogy,

the different types of media that are

out there allow or afford different

kinds of interactions. As I said here

books are great but they can't answer

your questions and if the information

changes in them then you need a second

edition.


The Alfred Wainwright's Walking Guide to the Lake District Fells 

is a very useful book to people like me who like to walk up mountains in the Lake District.

Lots of good graphical information and

textual information but

things change and these books were first

written in the 1950s and 1960s what

happened in the 2000s, was as you can see

there, produced a second edition; and you

can do this with books of course and the

information was updated and challenged

but the book can't do this itself. I

needed to buy these second editions it

wasn't like my first edition updated

itself. But nevertheless 

as I said at the beginning there's far

too much information

encoded it into books and still

being published in books for them to go

obselete anytime soon.

What I'm going to ask you to do now is

think about some books of your own. 


The book; I hope you realize now

there's a lot more depth in it and

there's a lot of ways in which the book

helps the user navigate around.

At the very least take this lesson

forward into any later work that you do.

You will look at Blackboard; you might

think Blackboard is easy to get around -

you might think it's difficult to get

around. Think about how you might make

the information on your team's Channel

easier to get around.

There are ways in which you can

format the information; there are ways in

which you can show that for instance.

You've got things like a headache - don't

underestimate the simple value of

increasing the font size and saying 'hey

I've got a heading'. All of these things

have been developing for 1500 years.

These are not things that were

invented by Bill Gates in 1997. 

So a lot of these ways in which 

our information

technologies help us navigate the

information that they are providing to

us are essential; and that is what makes

them useful. Those are the behaviors that

they afford.


Look we're out of time but

please, I will start a Friday class by

looking at some of your Learning

Environment Maps so please post them to

teams by the 20th. There's no

deadline as such and but it

would be nice to have a look at them on

Friday morning. So be ready

to talk about why - remember you should only be

putting things on your Maps if

you can say why it's there.



If you can't think why it's there don't

map it. We'll talk about social

shaping of technology because as I said

 it's possible that a technology

could afford many things in your

learning environment, be really useful,

but for whatever reason you might not be

allowed to use it or it might have

damaging effects.

And this is often politics does

technology have politics the answer is

very definitely yes, and we will talk

about that on Friday and then use 

social media as a case study in week

five


Please make sure you get your books back

and I want Watchmen back and my

Metro map.