Mobile devices, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Digital Geoscience Education.
Abstract
Mobile devices are playing an increasing role in geoscience education. Affordances include instructor-student communication and class management in large classrooms, virtual and augmented reality applications, digital mapping, and crowd-sourcing. Mobile technologies have spawned the sub field of mobile learning or m-learning, which is defined as learning across multiple contexts, through social and content interactions. Geoscientists have traditionally engaged in non-digital mobile learning via fieldwork, but digital devices are greatly extending the possibilities, especially for non-traditional students. Smartphones and tablets are the most common devices but smart glasses such as Pivothead enable live streaming of a first-person view (see for example, https://youtu.be/gWrDaYP5w58). Virtual reality headsets such as Google Cardboard create an immersive virtual field experience and digital imagery such as GigaPan and Structure from Motion enables instructors and/or students to create virtual specimens and outcrops that are sharable across the globe. Whereas virtual reality (VR) replaces the real world with a virtual representation, augmented reality (AR) overlays digital data on the live scene visible to the user in real time. We have previously reported on our use of the AR application called FreshAiR for geoscientific "egg hunts." The popularity of Pokémon Go demonstrates the potential of AR for mobile learning in the geosciences.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMED51F0830C
- Keywords:
-
- 0820 Curriculum and laboratory design;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0825 Teaching methods;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0840 Evaluation and assessment;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATION