Augmented Education

Bringing Real and Virtual Learning Together

K. Sheehy, R. Ferguson, G. Clough

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137335814
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Including relevant case studies and interviews with practitioners, Augmented Education explores the nature of learning where the 'real world' is augmented by use of the virtual to create new learning possibilities, tools, and environments. and offers insights into the development of a pedagogy that is authentic, inclusive and enjoyable.

CHAPTER 1

Augmenting Learning

Is there water on Mars? Today’s learners do not need to check a book—they can receive the latest updates on their computer or a handheld device. “My lidar laser has spotted snow falling from above,” tweets the Mars Phoenix lander. This is not static information, but part of an open conversation. “Do they have foggy mornings on Mars?” is one follow-up question (@S_in_washington, 2008). The interplanetary exchange continues five minutes later: “The snow I see above (a couple kilometers above) is water snow. And yes, @S_in_washington, I’m having foggy mornings too,” replies the distant robot (@MarsPhoenix, 2008). A remote world becomes more comprehensible, and thousands of people all over this world learn something new, something that inspires new questions, interest, and enthusiasm that continue even when the robot falls silent, a victim of the Martian winter.

These interactions are examples of “augmented learning.” Augmented learning uses electronic devices to extend learners’ interaction with and perception of their current environment to include and bring to life different times, spaces, characters, and possibilities. It offers possibilities for the transformation of learners and their learning contexts.

Augmented learning makes use of many aspects of augmented reality, in which information, models, or live action provide a useful or entertaining overlay on the real world. However, the assumption that such overlays are able to augment reality implies that we normally perceive an unmediated, objective reality that is independent of those who observe or augment it. This is an implicitly empiricist perspective that does not recognize many of the filters through which we already perceive and construct the world. Although “the real world” is so embedded in our language that the term is often used in this book in preference to “the physical world,” we argue that augmentation of the human experience is not simply an incremental process involving the addition of extra data or sensory experience. Rather, augmented learning involves the use of a wide variety of electronic devices to provide experiences and opportunities to spark a transformational process that has the potential to influence our identity and capabilities.

This book explores the implications and challenges of this form of learning, which takes place at the frontiers of reality, and the ways in which we can understand it, structure it, develop it, and employ it. It investigates what we can do now that we could not do before and asks whether these new possibilities could fundamentally affect how people approach and benefit from learning. For example, can augmented learning create the social, affective, and cognitive conditions that will allow individuals and groups of people not only to approach learning in a meaningful way but also to engage with it more deeply?

If so, the impact of these transformations on education and learners will be profound. This book explores the possible consequences of this change in different contexts, considering the learning experience of different groups and individuals who are already engaging in augmented learning. In order to do this, it focuses not only on research into learning in the “real world” that is augmented by the use of the virtual but also on learning in virtual environments that is augmented by the use of the “real.” It combines this wide range of research with consideration of augmented learning taking place in a variety of formal and informal educational settings, including some of the possibilities currently being shared on the Internet.

The book focuses on the multiple ways in which the virtual and the real are currently being mashed up, creating new learning possibilities, tools, and environments. In order to do this, it provides a detailed overview of the newest possibilities in education and shows how technological developments can be harnessed to support inclusive and collaborative knowledge building through formal and informal learning. In order to set the scene, this introduction explores why augmented learning is possible, the emergence of this new set of cultural tools, the implications of new technologies for learning and pedagogy, and the affordances that these new cultural tools offer to both learners and educators.

Augmented Learning and Cultural Tools

We are familiar with the idea of using tools to shape our interactions with the world. Physical tools such as hammers, tractors, pencils, and computers are taken for granted, and online tools such as search engines, e-mail applications, and cloud computing sites are now seen as commonplace within our everyday lives. However, the ubiquity of such tools acts to mask the influence of the use of such tools on ourselves.

At the start of the twentieth century, the influential educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky identified the ways in which our thinking about the world—cognition—and our emotional responses to the world—affect—are shaped and influenced by “psychological” or “cultural” tools. These are social devices that are “directed toward the mastery of [mental] processes—one’s own or someone else’s—just as technical devices are directed toward the mastery of processes of nature” (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 85). These “helping means” (Holland & Valsiner, 1988) include not only concrete artifacts but also intangibles such as scientific concepts, types of activity, and the use of language.

To illustrate the impact of such tools, we can consider the culturally mundane practice of learning to read, and the way in which this skill acts to change how individuals understand and hear speech (Olson, 1994). Since the time when writing was first used, its influence has been noted, including the concern that it might “create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” (Socrates, 327BCE).

Humans learn to speak without learning to read. Their subsequent acquisition of the cultural tool of reading provides them with a model for reflecting on their speech (Lucariello et al., 2004). Consequently, readers and nonreaders identify different numbers of sounds, and different sounds, in the words that they say. This is the case with people who use different writing systems, even where all groups share a common language (Olson, 1994). A writing system is, therefore, not a simple transcription of speech sounds. It is an augmentation that provides new ways of reflecting on and perceiving the natural world. At the same time, it is clear that writing makes it possible to engage in abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena or stated truth and thus “enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure, restructures thought” (Ong, 1982, p. 7).

In the Vygotskian paradigm, this type of transformation only occurs in “technologically advanced societies” (Crain, 2005, p. 199) in which learners have access to new ways of representing and reflecting on the world around them. Cultural tools do not help learners to capture an objective, independent reality; rather they help to construct learners’ perception and understanding of reality. Tools such as language, numbers, maps, and diagrams modify

the entire course and structure of mental functions by determining the structure of the new instrumental act, just as the technical tool modifies the process of natural adaptation by determining the form of labour operations. (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 85)

Vygotsky’s visionary psychology argues that humans are able to use culturally constructed tools to control their psychological processes because they

can not only modify the environment physically, but they can also modify its stimulus value for their own mental states. (Holland & Valsiner, 1988, p. 288)

At one level, this sociocultural stance is useful when considering electronic devices, including traditional augmented-reality technologies, and thinking about how these can transform our experience of the world. These technologies provide new ways of reading the “natural world” and consequently provide new influences on, and opportunities for control of, human development. At another level, this stance also informs discussion of the circumstances under which reality can be considered to be augmented, and suggests that a wide view of augmentation is needed in order to understand human experiences and human interactions in this new technological context.

Cultural tools can be considered at different levels of granularity. The possibilities of writing, for example, can be broken down into different subsets such as different languages, grammar, fonts, handwriting, or poetic structure. They can also be examined as a whole, presenting the wider cognitive changes offered by the medium:

With writing, the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and reorganize its more normal, redundant processes. (Ong, 1982, p. 40)

In this introduction, we set out an overview of the set of tools that can be used to support augmented learning, before focusing on specific tools and instances of their use in subsequent chapters. This set of tools includes some, such as the Internet, that are already ubiquitous, and others that are still under development. It includes the various forms of augmented reality, virtual reality, augmented virtuality, and diminished reality that apply to all our senses, including touch, hearing, and smell (Azuma, 1997; Azuma et al., 2001).

This set of previously disparate tools is potentially important for learning because of the extended interaction with and perception of our environment that they open up together. In many cases, though, we can currently see the potential but not strong evidence of practice, so why not simply wait to see how this area develops before considering its possibilities for learning?

Why Consider Augmented Learning Now?

Vygotsky noted that the processes and psychological methods used to control human thinking and experience can become “fossilized.” Once this has occurred, we use them automatically and are no longer aware either that we are using these tools to moderate the ways in which we think, or that they mediate our experience of the world. It is only before this fossilization takes place that we have the opportunity to examine cultural tools and understand their influence without having first to struggle to perceive them:

Groups take up new mediating devices, some of which become central to shaping the information and the processing of information in the society [ . . . ] There is a period in development and in history when the task or activity and the mediating device are not amalgamated and the dialectic between the mediating device and the task may be studied. (Holland & Valsiner, 1988)

This book examines emerging practices that employ a new set of tools. The relationship of these tools to human learning has not yet become fossilized; the practices associated with them are only just beginning, but their implications are already understood to be enormous. In 1993, Papert observed,

Already, children are made increasingly restive by the contrast between the slowness of School and the more exciting pace they experience in videogames and television. But the restiveness is only a pale precursor to what will come when they can freely enter virtual realities of animals in Africa or wars in ancient Greece . . . reading will no longer be the unique primary access road to knowledge and learning, and it should therefore no longer be the dominant consideration in the design of School. (1993)

And, more recently, Castronova predicted

I see a hurricane coming. It’s called practical virtual reality . . . Practical virtual reality emerged unannounced from the dark Imagineering labs of the video games industry, got powered by high-speed Internet connections, and exploded across the globe, catching us all by surprise. (2007)

It is at this point, as these tools and practices first appear in our educational landscape, that we can examine them, exploring the dialectic that is developing between them and our learning practices. In future, technologies that augment our perceived realities are likely to become ubiquitous and unnoticed, no more extraordinary than the ability to affix a lens to our eye to aid our sight, or to listen to a string quartet play Mozart while we are standing in a bus queue in the rain.

Already, early augmented changes in the learning landscape are everywhere. Through Twitter, Gunpowder Plotters reenact in real time their conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament in seventeenth-century London; within an open book a three-dimensional Juliet bends down from a balcony to share a sonnet with her Romeo; and a group of teenagers who have never met in real life sit in the virtual caves of Lascaux to discuss art and archaeology. From this perspective, books, pens, and paper appear to be destined for the scrapheap, forced aside by a deluge of new possibilities and technologies. Yet, by and large, new technologies for learning fail to stand the test of time. Some, such as the reading accelerator or the Skinnerian teaching machine, make little long-term impression; others, including the slide rule and the videotape, experience a dramatic fall in popularity, being replaced by newer technologies.

New Technologies and Learning

While new technologies come and go, the conventional image of learning remains that of children sitting at furniture designed for the individual use of writing materials, aligned for a clear view of a board at the front of the classroom. Large boards and individual writing materials were widely available when compulsory schooling was introduced, and variants of these technologies continue to shape our learning environments and our understanding of what learning could and should involve. Large parts of our curricula are devoted to developing expertise in the reading and writing skills necessary for their use, public examinations for young children focus on their expertise in these skills, and schools are judged on the extent to which they develop this expertise. A child who reaches the age of 11 and is unable to form letters to a good standard is conventionally judged to be a failing child, the product of a failing school. A child who reaches the age of 11 and is unable to type to a good standard is still the norm.

These limitations arise from our tendency to see new things in terms of old paradigms. Sheehy and Bucknall (2009) asked young people about their ideal educational futures. A typical example, drawn by a young girl, depicted herself sitting on a peaceful beach while working on her laptop. She is working on quizzes and her results are immediately “beamed” to the government. In this vision, technology allows the girl to change her learning environment, making it a beautiful and relaxing place, but her view of education is limited to direct transmission, individualized testing, and an importance derived from governmental interests. Sheehy and Bucknall (2009) discuss how such imaginings reflect learners’ current experiences. This highlights the risk that learners and educators will unthinkingly assimilate the possibilities for augmented learning and changes to the learning environment into existing practices, thereby perpetuating pedagogies and political practices from the industrialized age of information transmission via the blackboa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1  Augmenting Learning
• Chapter 2  Augmenting Schools
• Chapter 3  Augmenting Teaching
• Chapter 4  Augmentation with the Virtual
• Chapter 5  Augmenting Informal Subject-based Learning
• Chapter 6  Augmenting Learning Using Social Media
• Chapter 7  Augmenting Collaborative Informal Learning
• Chapter 8  Augmenting Learners: Educating the Transhuman
• Chapter 9  Conclusions and Where to Start
• References
• Index