Augmented reality has been a fascination with me for the last couple of years. In fact, when I purchased my Nexus One almost two years ago, one of the apps preloaded on it was Google Goggles, Google's augmented reality app for visual searching and location-based searching. It was a little disappointing using this app at first, it was not simple to use and provided too many visual search results to be usable, it was really just a toy at the time. But now I am gearing up for the final project for our EPSY 590ML course and our team is focusing on augmented reality for educational purposes. Looking at other augmented reality tools for reference such as: Layar, Yelp, Wikitude, these types of applications create a new way to search which is really interesting. Google just purchased a company called PittPatt which specializes in object recognition software; it will be interesting to find out how Google plans to incorporate such a technology into its Web 2.0 platforms. One of my classmates in the GSE program in cohort 8, focused on visual literacy for his final project in our capstone course and I had never heard these two terms used together, but I found the concept very important. As the proliferation of mobile devices continue and as mobile devices can interpret and recognize images more easily, visual literacy is going to be an important skill for all people.
Here is an interesting Ted Talk about Visual Literacy by Brian Kennedy, the director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College:
As technologies such as augmented reality move from early adopter or innovator status to becoming a more mainstream and widely adopted technology, should curricula be updated to incorporate visual literacy? Kennedy states that 90% of our meaning comes through visuals, so as he argues, I think it will be critical for visual literacy to be a consideration in an curriculum review and ultimately added to curricula.
One question I have is: will our devices become more visually literate than we are, at least in terms of interpreting or reading visual images? If our devices can begin constructing meaning from what they read, then it is possible that they may become more literate. We, humans may have some catching up to do with our devices.
About a year and a half ago I downloaded to my Nexus One an application called Barcode Scanner v3.6, I think downloaded this particular app because I had read in some article it was an “essential” app you should have on your mobile phone.
It utilizes the camera on my phone and the data connection. It seemed like an interesting application, it can scan 1D barcodes, QR codes and data matrixes. I really did not find a use for it, so it was one of those apps that just took up storage on my phone. One day I was looking through my contacts and saw an option to share a contact, and one of the options was the barcode scanner app. I thought was pretty interesting that I could create my own QR code to share this contact on the fly. After creating a few QR codes with my contacts, I started thinking about the convenience factor of sharing contacts through QR codes, but I did not do anything with this application again. One of the downsides to sharing contacts this way is that the person you are sharing your contact with must have a QR reader, but the fact that my phone was producing QR codes is interesting. Now that the topic of the week is QR codes I spent some time exploring my mobile devices using QR codes – this was design principle 9 in the University of Wollongong article - Personalise: Employ the learners’ own mobile devices.
Last night I began using both of my Android devices to explore QR codes on my mobile devices and found a few interesting personal uses, which will lead into a discussion of using these for educational purposes. First and foremost I learned I can create QR codes for more than contacts. In a discussion from a previous blog posting I discussed the ecosystem within the Android environment – it may be similar in iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and WebOS - that built into many of the applications is the option to share information you have created on the mobile device. Typical sharing options include sharing via: email, Bluetooth, SMS, Facebook, Twitter and QR Codes. The convenience options are allow me with the push of a button to share this information.
As I was employing my mobile device for exploration of QR codes I found the following Apps utilized QR codes and I can construct my own codes:
· - Contacts
- Catch Notes for creating and sharing documents
- Articles from News sites like Pulse
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- The Android market App allows you to share links to apps via QR codes
- Google Maps and Places
- Sharing YouTube video
There are many other applications that can create QR codes for sharing, but these are the ones available to me on my devices.
I was traveling home this week and while on the plane I was preparing for a meeting where I was going to provide an orientation to the web conferencing software I work with. Using my tablet to jot down some notes for the agenda of this meeting. Using Catch’s sharing capability I created a QR code for the agenda. I took a picture of my mobile phone with the QR code and the agenda - it may not be the clearest picture, but I find it difficult to take pictures of mobile applications:
There appear to be some limitations to QR codes. Firstly, the codes work well for encapsulating text oriented information, which for mobile devices is ideal, but mobile devices are quite advanced these days easily supporting video and images. For sharing text-oriented information, QR codes work well. Someone had posted a video of a panel discussion this week regarding QR codes and using them for multiple purposes, mostly from a marketing perspective. The person from Microsoft mentioned a limitation of QR codes which do not reside in Microsoft Tags. Once a QR code is produced, it is static meaning that you cannot change the content it represents, whereas Microsoft Tags can be updated once produced. For marketing purposes, the Microsoft Tag would appear to hold greater benefits.
In thinking about uses for QR codes for educational purposes I can think of:
Sharing content – students using mobile apps like Catch can create documents and then share these documents with other students so that they can view them on their mobile devices. This could be an instant peer review on a mobile device.
Expanding the field trip experience – when taking students on field trips, using their mobile devices they can access QR codes to gain more information about what they are seeing.
At academic conferences QR codes can be used in the program guides to provide more information about the session speaker or links to their research.
Universities could use QR codes in their advertisements for their programs, potential students could access the codes to learn more about a given degree.
·There are many more potential uses for these codes.
Sal Khan, a former hedge fund analyst living in Boston, Massachusetts in 2004, began tutoring his cousins who were living in New Orleans, Louisiana and in need of a deeper understanding of mathematics. What began with short and focused instructional videos with Khan teaching unit conversion using a virtual blackboard and talking through the logic of solving these problems, expanded to a library of over 2,100 instructional video lessons, 100 self-paced practice exercises and metrics to analyze the learner’s progress available for anyone in the world to use. He formed the Khan Academy as away to share his video lessons and help students better understand various math and science topics explained in ways that were different than how he was taught in the classroom and through textbooks. In referring to his experiences with math and science and the reason he is building this catalogue of lessons, Khan states:
“A lot of my own educational experience was spent frustrated with how information was conveyed in textbooks and lectures. There would be connections in the subject matter that standard curricula would ignore despite the fact that they make the content easier to understand, enjoy, and RETAIN. I felt like fascinating and INTUITIVE concepts were almost intentionally being butchered into pages and pages of sleep-inducing text and monotonic, scripted lectures. I saw otherwise intelligent peers memorizing steps and formulas for the next exam without any sense of the intuition or big picture, only to forget everything within a matter of weeks. These videos are my expression of how the concepts should have been expressed in the first place, all while not compromising rigor or comprehensiveness.” (http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq)
Khan refers to himself as the faculty of the Khan Academy since he creates all of the instructional videos. The Khan Academy has become viral; students and parents have found Khan’s resources exceedingly beneficial and a supplement for their foundational understanding of math and science.
Here is an example of one of Khan’s lessons:
What Christensen envisions as student centered learning enabled through computer-based learning systems, ultimately developed from bottom-up or grassroots efforts may start to be realized through the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy fits with Christensen’s believe that change can happen from forces outside of the traditional school system, and Sal Khan could not have embodied someone coming from outside the system any better given his background as an analyst at a hedge fund. All of the videos developed by Khan are freely available for anyone to use - in the classroom, at home or on the go through various mobile applications. The videos run from a couple of minutes up to twenty minutes focusing on:
-Mathematics
-Science
-Humanities
-Finance
-Test Preparation
oSAT Math
oGMAT
oCalifornia High School Exit Examination
oIndian Institute of Technology (IIT) Joint Entrance Exam – IITs are some of the top engineering institutions in the world
oSingapore Math curriculum
Students, parents and teachers have found Khan's lessons extremely beneficial because learners have the opportunity to review topics and concepts that they may not have fully comprehended in the classroom or by reading the textbook. As Christensen discusses, in the classroom once a topic has been taught the class moves on together to the next topic regardless of all learners’ comprehension of the material. These videos allow learners to review concepts that they did not understand at their own pace, and they can review the video lessons as many times as they need to with the options to pause the video and go back to specific concepts using the scrub bar. If a student is learning a new topic and needs a remedial understanding of foundational concepts, the instructional videos provide learners an opportunity to spend time reviewing materials that will allow them to begin learning the new concept.
School districts are beginning trial the Academy’s lessons as part of a math curriculum, providing students with the ability to work at their own pace and learn new mathematical concepts. The Santa Rita Elementary School in Los Altos, California is currently piloting both the self-paced practice exercises and videos; the exercises encourage students to achieve ten correct answers in a row before they can move onto a new topic. If the student does not understand how to solve a problem they will have access to link to video lessons explaining how to solve the problem. Teachers and parents have access to detailed metrics to track how a learner is progressing through the self-paced exercises, how much time is spent with exercises and their success with the materials.
In the News and Media
The Khan Academy’s grassroots success has attracted media attention and funding from the Gates Foundation.
Khan has been named one of Forbes Names you Need to Know:
The Khan Academy has been featured in the News Hour:
Khan gave a talk at TED in 2011:
Distribution Platforms
The Khan Academy has multiple distribution platforms for delivery of their online lessons utilizing social media and mobile technologies including:
- Various mobile applications that link to the Academy's library – Since Khan distributes these lessons freely, mobile application developers for iOS and Android have created applications that draw upon the catalogue of video content. The mobile applications range from replications of the catalogue of lessons, which will link out to specific videos on YouTube and are viewable on mobile devices to applications that will play the video lesson within the mobile application.
Mobile Application
The mobile application reviewed for this case study is the Khan Academy application created by Dennis Bond which is found in the Android Market. This application catalogues the available lessons and links out to YouTube video for learners to review the lesson. With YouTube built-in as default application on Android devices, the linkage between the application and YouTube is rather seamless. The application is simple, which for younger students is advantageous so that they can easily find the lesson they want and then view it on their mobile device. Bond’s application is not endorsed by the Khan Academy. Below are screen shots of the application
Please note: the mobile application linked from the Khan Academy website, created by Irynsoft was not reviewed for this case study as it would not properly launch on two Android devices, an HTC Nexus One (Android 2.3.3) and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Android 3.1).
Benefits for Learners
The Khan Academy provides learners with another set of resources to utilize that may better align with their learning styles. For students that have access to mobile devices or computers, accessing these video lessons may provide them with another way to approach solving a problem and ultimately aid in their comprehension. The Khan Academy's grassroots efforts have turned into a worldwide phenomena, and overtime it will be interesting to see how projects like the one in Los Altos progress. Additionally the metrics which are being collected on the website as student utilize the self-paced exercises will provide Khan with data to help him improve the lessons and tools available in his ecosystem. Khan's resources have helped students enhance their learning and will continue to do so in the future.
While waiting for my delayed flight I tried using the Twitter App on my Nexus One. This post is coming from my mobile phone and later edited once I got to a computer.
Brad Beecher (@bradbeecher) has shared a Tweet with you: "bradbeecher: Leaving DCA http://t.co/XVMnV2n."
I am on my flight now and I think I am sitting next to former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. Gotta go. Flight leaving. After arriving, it was confirmed that I was sitting next to the former Fed Chairman.
Back to mobile learning - the Twitter App on my phone was a breeze to use, in fact it let me share my tweet with my blog - hence the reference to the earlier tweet. It is pretty interesting how all of these various apps are integrated to provided a more seamless experience for the end user. I have no idea how an iPhone works as I find Apple's iOS exceedingly confusing to use and Android really quite simple, but Android must have some sharing API utilized by some of their built-in apps and used by 3rd party developers. It makes sharing photos, videos, tweets, contacts and much more so easy and it appears to be interoperable. Android is a great mobile platform, I cannot wait to get an Android tablet soon.
