Edustange

Dean Shareski took a moment over lunch to demonstrate this to me and then I demonstrated it to my students. Many of them lit up when I suggested we might be able to design our own figures some time. How we might do this will unfold in time I am sure. How we might find it useful in communicating learning together is another question. At the moment, designing your own models so they mesh with our physical environment is time consuming. Imagine the possibilities though. I have to lay this one aside for the moment I think.

I could not quite lay aside the concept of augmenting reality though. An iPhone app that provides data display reminded me of a concept I struggled to convey to my high school history students. When they would ask me why they should study history, I would respond with the the familiar rationale that we inform our contemporary decision-making with our understanding of past events and the way they have shaped our contemporary lives. I then tried to explain that historical literacy adds dimension to immediate experience. This is of course true of all learning. Learning augments reality.

My wife is a reluctant farm girl. Very happy now in the modest urbanity of Moose Jaw, her childhood was spent on a small farm in the Saskatchewan southwest. There is next to nothing there now. Her childhood homes are gone. Most of the outbuildings have been removed and the shelter belts are wild and in decay. I stood beside her last summer as she surveyed all this and knew each aspect she absorbed was layered with information inaccessible to me. Like the image triggered by the card in the video above, buildings, machines and people pop into view. There is also the constant data flow we retain about all things in our lives. It is not visual, but adheres to the objects we see. We rely heavily on this data flow of memory and accumulated facts and most of it comes to us unconsciously.

An iPhone that gives directions seems fairly benign. Augmented reality that attempts to persuade makes me pause.  The years of learning and life experience that have augmented my reality are personal and reflective. Advertising is cunning stuff and very different from learning. I would be more cautious about the claims that pop up as I scan the stores along a street.

A case can still be made for accumulating a store of organized knowledge in schools. We are not just sophisticated operating systems that need affective applications to process and display information. We operate on a core of knowledge about the physical, social and ethical environment we inhabit.  It is not enough to understand how a nation is structured, we need to understand the particulars of our own nation. Augmenting our reality digitally may become very useful to us, but the end game is augmenting our personal lived experience.