The Knowledge Illusion

I am normally sluggish in the morning at first and then after a while my body and mind warms up and by the time I get on the train I am fit for a flurry of activity. I notice that many people are busily occupied in the morning in contrast to our sleepy souls on the evening trip back home. I suspect that my little burst of energy is something of an irritation to some of my work colleagues as my emails come flooding in as a large ungainly lump. This morning I was mid sentence when something caught my eye on the drinks trolley – it was a set of adverts appearing on a small video screen at the back of the cart. Adverts designed to entice people to buy the coffee that will burst open their day, and can be enjoyed any way, the water fresh from the spring to give them a zing or, rather less suitably for this hour, the Californian Merlot that costs a bit more dough. This distraction set me thinking and I mused to the rhythm of my neighbour’s mp3 player. I wondered if I had a trolley to entice people to engage with a particular brand of technology to support their learning what would my little adverts say and depict? I can’t promise to offer a definitive decision in a single blog post and reserve the right to come back this distraction again.

So, what would I want my trolley to advertise?… First, I think I would go for something where technology ‘refreshes the parts other forms of learning cannot reach’. There has been a proliferation of powerful and sophisticated digital technologies that are embedded in the environment; and built into small personal devices, televisions and personal computers. These technologies enable the augmentation of our environment through accessing physically tagged data, which can be retrieved and viewed from multiple perspectives. This puts a whole new meaning to the idea of ‘letting your fingers do the walking’

The digital augmentation of reality (AR) can enable people to see the world around them differently, to share their own perceptions and to view the perceptions of others through stored information. AR has been shown to have the potential to support learning, engage learners and has been predicted to gain widespread usage within the next 2-5 years (2011 Horizon Report). Augmentation is not restricted to the visual layering of representations on a physical reality, it also manifests itself as audio augmentation. watch movie

Neither is it restricted to the physical reality of a person’s context: popular locations based applications, such as foursquare, situate and integrate location and social media.

There have been few evaluations of the impact of AR technologies on learning, and yet the speed of its development for mobile phones has resulted in its migration from the research lab to teenager’s pockets – people are ‘just doing it’. As researchers, we don’t have a clear understanding of the impact of AR upon learning, attitude or behaviour change. We can only look and learn as this technology and our relationship to it evolves. It is a fascinating space where the boundaries between producers and consumers blur and the essence of participatory design is wonderfully and ‘curiously strong’. This might just be everyone’s very own personal ‘greatest show on earth’.