In the context of research in education and TEL research, the term
"educational affordance" has acquired a meaning which relates to the
search to express properties of an environment which in interaction with
a user enhance the learning potential:
- "Educational affordances are those characteristics of an
artifact (e.g. how a chosen educational paradigm is implemented) that
determine if and how a particular learning behavior could possibly be
enacted within a given context (e.g., project team, distributed learning
community). Educational affordances can be defined [...] as the
relationships between the properties of an educational intervention and
the characteristics of the learner (for CSCL: learner and learning
group) that enable particular kinds of learning by him/her (for CSCL:
members of the group too)."
(Kirschner 2002, p.14"