Following up on my views on pervasive learning and context aware resources and building on my last post on using a holistic model to help design a pervasive approach to playful learning, we are working on some demo ideas to be implemented by the summer intern(s).
Reconceptualising physical and digital spaces as playful learning environment populated with contextualised resources will open up opportunities for promoting a more active and applied approach to learning. The following diagram illustrates the idea of extending the classroom context into a hybrid space and other informal spaces.
Referring back to layers 3 and 4, we are looking to play-test two open-source authoring tools for pervasive gaming – ArisExplorer and TaleBlazer. ArisExplorer has been adopted by the Institute of Play (New York) for their QuestToLearn school, and TaleBlazer is a tool that has been developed by the MIT Media Lab (STEP group for EducationArcade), which was recommended to me during my visit there last May.
How can we facilitate active and contextualised learning? What learning mechanics are supported by pervasive game mechanics? What is the correlation with intrinsic motivation and self-reinforcement when learning is applied outside of the classroom setting?
Watch this space!