Susan led our team on a paper that won the best paper award for the American Education Research Association (AERA) Special Interest Group Instructional Technology (SIG IT).
Land, S. M., Zimmerman, H. T., Seely, B. J., Mohney, M. R., Dudek, J., Jung, Y., & Choi, G. W., (2015, April). Photo-capture and annotations supporting observations in outdoor mobile learning. 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Chicago, IL.
SIG IT best paper award for 2015
Heather Zimmerman is presented emerging research findings from our team’s COIL grant at the 2nd Annual COIL Research Symposium on Thursday, October 16.
The Augmented and Mobile Learning Research Group’s COIL grant is a 12-month research project on how mobile computers can support engagement with the life sciences in people’s communities. Project Co-Directors Heather Zimmerman and Susan Land began this project to compare forms of technologically enhanced facilitation in regard to supporting learners to think scientifically at the Arboretum at Penn State and Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center. The technologically enhanced facilitation supports observing to encourage deliberate noticing that will lead to the development of scientific concepts as learners coordinate information contained on the mobile computer with the specimens on-site.
Prior to this funded project, our team conducted two small scale qualitative studies (see our Publications Page). Now with the COIL funds, we engaged in a more rigorous series of qualitative and multi-condition, design-based research studies in summer 2014 that examined various aspects of mobile computing pedagogy. Our publications on this new work are forthcoming.
In addition to Heather and Susan, members of the COIL project team include: Brian J. Seely, Michael R. Mohney, Gi Woong Choi, Jaclyn Dudek, Yong Ju Jung, and Lucy R. McClain.
In the January/February 2014 issue of TechTrends, Heather and Susan offer a design paper that brings together research on place-based education with research on mobile computing’s location awareness feature. In this article, we developed three design guidelines to support learners to develop rich science-related understandings within local communities.
(1) Facilitate participation in disciplinary conversations & practices within personally-relevant places
(2) Amplifying observations to see the disciplinary-relevant aspects of a place
(3) Extending experiences through exploring new perspectives, representations, conversations, & knowledge artifacts
We illustrate these design ideas with a case study from our Tree Investigator project.
To access the journal article from the TechTrends site (subscription is required), click here. To download the pdf from our website’s publication list instead, please click here and navigate to Zimmerman & Land (2014).
New in 2014 – a TechTrends special issue
We started this year with new energy for supporting learners with augmented reality (AR) and mobile computers. As editors of a special issue for the journal TechTrends by AECT, we (Susan and Heather) sought out experts in the fields of augmented reality and mobile learning. The authors offer the field empirical studies and design papers that offer ideas for designers, teachers, museum and other out-of-school educators, and researchers at all stages.
In this issue, we have nine articles on three themes:
1) Developing & scaling mobile games for learning
2) Museum exhibits & everyday experiences to foster learning interactions
3. Designing for place-based learning in the outdoors
We are interested if these authors’ perspectives can inform our own projects— so do leave us a comment to share what projects you’re working on.
Students use smartphone to view 3-D images.
Posted in Design, Research, Team publications!
Tagged augmented reality, design, mobile computing, mobile learning, research, special issue, TechTrends
