Augmented reality, I’m thinking this could be a sense of ‘situated learning’ imbued with technology based learning tools.
Wikitude is a mob who are facilitating AR use on mobile platforms. My holiday project will be to make a ‘world’ and upload it to wkitude. Stay tuned!
The essential point here is that this represents a change in pedagogy. Teaching and learning is not about content / curriculum delivery. The notion of a ‘Maths Teacher’ or any other specialist is bizzare to me. It presupposes that all students (and the teacher) will drop whatever agenda they are pursuing as they enter the ‘maths’ room for their ‘maths’ lesson and adopt a ‘maths student’ persona is order to make it nice and easy for the adult (who has adopted a ‘maths teacher’ persona) to deliver the maths information which they shall somehow learn. This notion has more or less worked in a pragmatic sense ( perhaps ‘social contract theory‘ may account for this in some manner) but at the expense of student agency / student voice, and in conflict with the idea that learning happens in, through and with people. Schools are not sites for learning – students are.
AR then, is a means by which we can bring the person of the learner – their interests, their ideas, their existing skills and networks and direct them in meaningful learning that results in the student (and teacher) creating something new and rich. Something which tells what they have learned about the ‘content’ and a mirror or milestone in their transformation of self (transmogriphication). These artifacts become the intersects of life where students can see how they have changed and contrasted a perception of themselves before and after the learning event.
Before learning about AR I did not conceive of myself as being able to teach in a way that I would like to – getting kids into their lived environment to do learning (one small example). With the knowledge about AR and wikitude I can see the potential for becoming the person I expect of myself. Having achieved this, I will have a transformed idea of myself as someone who can now BE or Do what I had wanted to do. (Think Piercian Abduction in that I endup with ‘self with current perception’ and start with ‘self with other than current perception’ What have been the change agents? )