One of the positive results of investigations into making work more effective has been the notion of transparency, which manifests as either working and learning ‘out loud‘, or in calls to Show Your Work. In these cases, it’s so people can know what you’re doing, and either provide useful feedback or learn from you. However, a recent chat in the L&D Revolution group on LinkedIn on Augmented Reality (AR) surfaced another idea.
We were talking about how AR could be used to show how to do things, providing information for instance on how to repair a machine. This has already been seen in examples by BMW, for instance. But I started thinking about how it could be used to support education, and took it a bit further.
So many years ago, Jim Spohrer proposed WorldBoard, a way to annotate the world. It was like the WWW, but it was location specific, so you could have specific information about a place at the place. And it was a good idea that got some initial traction but obviously didn’t continue.
The point, however, would be to ‘expose’ the world. In particular, given my emphasis on the value of models, I’d love to have models exposed. Imagine what we could display:
- the physiology of an animal we’re looking at to flows of energy in an ecosystem
- the architectural or engineering features of a building or structure
- the flows of materials through a manufacturing system
- the operation of complex devices
The list goes on. I’ve argued before that we should expose our learning designs as a way to hand over learning control to learners, developing their meta-learning skills. I think if we could expose how things work and the thinking behind them, we’d be boosting STEM in a big way.
We could go further, annotating exhibits and performances as well. And it could be auditory as well, so you might not need to have glasses, or you could just hold up the camera and see the annotations on the screen. You could of course turn them on or off, and choose which filters you want.
The systems exist: Layar commercially, ARIS in the open source space (with different capabilities). The hard part is the common frameworks, agreeing what and how, etc. However, the possibilities to really raise understanding is very much an opportunity. Making the workings of the world visible seems to me to be a very intriguing possibility to leverage the power we now hold in our hand. Ok, so this is ‘out there’, but I hope we might see this flourishing quickly. What am I missing?
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