A few days ago a coworker and I booked a city sightseeing tour in Barcelona. Although I’ve been living in this city for a long time I thought it could be interesting live the city as a tourist at least once in my life. After two hours I realised that there are some details that I never paid attention to and it would have been helpful be aware that I was near of an interesting place.
My Location Based Learning example
Based on my experience in my city sightseeing tour in Barcelona and after reading this post from Dr. Allen Patridge about how he developed the Location Based Learning to create its Australia Zoo App I have created my own Location Based Learning experience.
The scenario:
The application will highlight the most important places of the Gothic quarter of Barcelona. To do so, the users will have to carry their smartphone during their visit and enable geolocation. Depending on their location the application will show up an interesting place to visit and also suggests a place to drink or eat something. (Of course, these places are my favourite ones :D)
Features:
- You can view the content through your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry Z10.
- Geolocation.
- Responsive
Click on the image to view the example
Scan this code to view the example
What’s Location Based Learning?
Why should we limit the learning in a four square class or in a virtual learning environment? Instead, why we don’t take advantage of the ability of geolocation to enable content fly over to the user and deliver the content that needs at that point? This is the general idea of Location Based Learning.
Location Based Learning is not new. Although it seems an innovative idea it was proposed by Jean Lave y Etienne Wenger under the name of Situated Learning focused in Communinties of Practice (CoP). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning
But it seems that with the raise of mobile phones that enables geolocation and the growth of user feeling more confident activating this feature and even tagging where they are (Foursquare) the idea has becoming more popular than ever.
What are the uses of location based learning?
You can see it in action in a lots of museums where at the beginning of the tour you carry a mobile device and while you go through all the aisles or rooms of the museum a notification comes up for you to tap and hear an explanation of that specific place you are.
Another example is the use of Augmented Reality to learn the history of the city. Once I discovered the following application: Barcelona, Then and Now Guide. It uses the Augmented Reality feature to show an old version of that building.
Resources
- http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2014/06/location-aware-learning-example-with-complete-source-files-for-the-australia-zoo-app.html
- https://prezi.com/ztfrvpxmdsrz/location-based-mobile-learning/
- http://www.academia.edu/832936/Introduction_to_location-based_mobile_learning
- https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7047.pdf
- http://floatlearning.com/2013/09/location-based-mobile-learning-on-the-way/
- http://floatlearning.com/2011/11/using-location-based-services-to-fill-our-brains-not-just-our-bellies/
- http://www.academia.edu/1567661/Designing_Online_Collaborative_Location-Aware_Platform_for_History_Learning
- https://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/ako-hub/ako-aotearoa-northern-hub/mobile-learning-business-game
- http://www.academia.edu/1567661/Designing_Online_Collaborative_Location-Aware_Platform_for_History_Learning
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHr4yPfIFgM
A mobile learning experience based on student location #mlearning #experiments #geolocation http://t.co/LIjKPPM9un