By mtgwork December 13, 2012
Content Development
Augmented Reality, pedagogy, Team SCARLET

On Friday 7th December Team SCARLET visited the University for the Creative Arts (UCA) to give a workshop on augmented reality. The following thoughts and questions in this blog post are taken from the notes of one of the attendees to the workshop, Rebecca Skeels, Pathway Leader in Jewellery & Metalwork: Three Dimensional Design, School of Crafts, Visual Arts & Design, Farnham.

Potential uses for AR within UCA and for students of Jewellery & Metalwork:

• Marketing – people could scan the CSC or UCA or Library buildings and get information about what’s inside
• Linking of information – to the real world, to documents, to geo-locations, and to objects
• Exhibitions – use of AR to add information from videos and/or text by curators and makers. This could also encourage research: processes, thoughts, views; and provide background on artists or course background
• Workshops and equipment – students could scan equipment to access instructions on using it safely – it would be good if they could also add their own notes and test pieces and snapshots to this to make a digital personal technical file
• Rooms and maps – adding useful information i.e. similar to marketing information

Some questions about the use of AR in education and research:

• With AR could we be locking down information? or limiting, rather than encouraging, research and research methods?
• Could AR and research be viewed as separate things?
• Who do we get to do it all?
• It would be interesting to see AR working without the use of the QR codes, for example it recognising an image in a book or on a plinth
• How can staff keep up-to-date with the technology? What happens when it doesn’t work?
• There is a need to value the searching skills and personal methods of searching for various projects (also different per student).
• Is AR something that helps students learn and remember? What about note taking skills? Students gathering the collection information themselves? Do the gallery environment and archive environment need to be separated from the teaching and education environment to embed into courses?

We look forward to following these discussions up with our lead academic, as well as Rebecca, and also students themselves.