Way back when Halo2 was coming out, there was a real buzz about augmented reality gaming. I Love Bees (ILB) was a part of the viral marketing behind the game and it was also part of the whole flashmob thing that was going on back then as well. Fast forward a few years and games are still very important in pop culture, but now with the addition of ideas like geocaching and mlearning, augmented reality learning might be ready to take off in a big way.
Nokia is working on some feature recognition technologies that can use the camera embedded within their phones to identify where the user is. If you combine that with the ability to pull down location specific content, you have the start of an incredibly powerful learning system. Portable devices that can provide enrichment to the location according to what the user prompts the device for, or, what the system of user and device determines as appropriate for the location. If you think about it, what better personal learning environment could there be than the real world itself. One of the issues that I see with this is that it would take some really careful crafting to ensure that the risks that the student would take while learning would be appropriate. Because even though it’s “cool” to bash the classic classroom, it is the place that provides a safe controlled environment to present materials to the student, the real world certainly doesn’t afford that (but that is exactly what the bashers say that they want in learning environments today – because they see that uncertainty as being essential).
I don’t think this is going to take off that fast though as we (at least in North America) are just barely starting to look into laptops for every student in a big way and mobile devices are still scorned. Mix this up with the high cost of wireless data and this might be a pipe dream, but we can only hope. And while we wait, there is always stuff like this, this or this.
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