Augmented Reality Forum

AR enhances a learning environment, so that it is a more engaging and immersive experience for students. Being able to interact with their surroundings, students construct a better understanding of what they are learning. Radke (2017) highlights how AR will change the way students interact with data, how it will decrease the learning curve, how it will increase student productivity, and how it will improve the way we share information. AR enables learners to interact with computer-generated 3D images/environments. Students can examine these images/environments from different angles, zoom in or out, and generate text to read more information about what they are viewing. Thinking back to my own experience in high school, I think AR would have definitely enhanced my understanding of concepts we were taught in Biology. We did participate in labs where we worked in groups of three to four people on dissections, but the value of this experience was somewhat limited because of the lack of space, time and materials. I can only imagine how much more engaging our classroom lectures would have been had we also had the opportunity to engage in a 3D, immersive environment as we learned about the digestive system, the circulatory system, the respiratory system, etc. TedxTalks. (2017, Apr 19) How augmented reality will change education completely [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/5AjxGqzqQ54

I believe AR would have been helpful in STEM subjects. Not only would everyone benefit from more immersive and interactive experiences, but perhaps it might have leveled the playing a field a bit between the boys and the girls (or perhaps leveled the delivery, if that were the source of any prejudices or biases). I remember being stuck in a lot of theoretical STEM courses and am sure that had they come more alive for me, I would have seen the creative potential within them sooner. AR could play an inspiring role for everyone, and perhaps even more so to girls. Julia

I am confident that technical bugs and challenges will eventually be solved. As I mentioned in response to another post, my concerns are primarily ethical around privacy. (I was not even comfortable registering my selfie with Blippar without knowing more about how this company operates and is governed.) Technology is very exciting, but while we tinker with it, we may not notice how it is - or is not - being regulated. Who will get access to facial recognition imagery? How will privacy be protected? As a parent, I would be very worried about a child’s privacy if classroom practices were not carefully practiced with children under 18. Teachers will surely get excited about certain technologies, and the slightest slip could reveal personal information that could fall into the hands of unscrupulous people. I remember when Facebook was the first company to push “real” identities online, and recall very well that some of my most tech-savvy and tech industry friends and family insisted on always keeping an ID “handle”; to this day, many do not use their real names online. In an uncertain world, it doesn’t feel paranoid anymore; it feels like common sense. Now, with teachers having grown up with technology normalized, how can we teach critical media literacy and technology skills to new generations of students? What ethical and privacy codes should they be taught? Julia