 |
Okay, as the title of this week's reflective blog indicates, I am a fan of Augmented Reality (AR). I liked the idea as soon as I heard and understood it. The excellent presentation by guest speaker Marisa Yamada reinforced my belief that AR is both cool and can be a potentially very powerful tool to help us educators turn our students into learners.
Without putting too fine a point to it, the vast majority of 20 something (and younger) college students are true-blue-dyed-in-the-wool "short attention spanners." They grew up with tools and technology that we could only dream of as we watched Star Trek as kids. Our old school educational technology (printed books) just cannot compete with instant gratification electronics. Books, no matter how well written, cannot hold a candle to all the electronic entertainment that our students play with on a daily basis.
Books, whether printed on paper or displayed upon a screen, are still an integral part of the machinery we use to educate. AR offers an ideal "bridge" between the old school world of static words and the living world of interactive content. By bridging this divide, AR provides educators with the proper tools to translate static information into the virtually living and very intriguing knowledge which seems to naturally catch and hold the interest of today's learners. In effect, AR allows educators to translate our knowledge and communicate it readily to our students.
 |
| Me As Mona Lisa via FaceStealer |
As a photography art teacher I am very excited about the possible applications of AR into my classroom. Composition is the hardest skill to teach. I can imagine an AR application on one's phone that allows one to pre-visualize a shot by overlaying a database full of successful compositions and explanations as to why they work over an existing scene. In effect, this AR app could let the student photographers preview the shot and learn how and why their audience will react and respond to a given composition.
Likewise, an understanding of light is one of the foundational stones of a good photographer. AR offers one the opportunity to "set up" various lighting arrangements and to see how the light will affect the subject. The ability to visualize a shot via AR will help students experiment and play without requiring access to expensive lights. It will allow them to spend more time visualizing and less time actually setting up, measuring, and moving lights.
Granted, AR is still just in its infancy. I doubt that my compositional teaching idea is even possible. However, there are still many ways in which AR can already be used. Furthermore, the idea about using AR to set up virtual lights is not as unreasonable as it might at first sound. Photoshop allows one to add lights, change their angles, and change their intensity already. It will not be long before it can be done on a mobile phone.
As educators we need to get ahead of and stay in front of the AR educational technology wave. Even as immature as AR is, it still has much to offer. We should maximize the current benefits it offers and thereby prepare ourselves and our students for all the educational possibilities it will provide in the future.
 |
| Me as Fukuzawa Yukichi vis FaceStealer |
No comments:
Post a Comment