By Laura Skilton (formerly Shaw) December 18, 2012
Project overview, SCARLET+, Technical Training
Augmented Reality, dissemination, examples, Mimas, pedagogy

I have not found too many examples of Augmented Reality (AR) used in teaching and learning, so I’d love to hear from anyone that has one, or in fact people that would like to work on AR projects in 2013. After all the work we have done in the past two years and all the enthusiasm we have built up at Mimas it means we are now able to offer bespoke training  for institutions or get involved in projects.

I wasn’t so interested in prospectus or marketing purposes, although there is some good work going on and the benefits are pretty obvious. I was interested in teachers working with educational technologists to develop pedagogically sound AR, in other words AR that helps teachers to teach and students to learn. AR is such a new area for teaching, it’s really important to promote those of us that are experimenting. We’ve certainly found ways that it works well and ways that it doesn’t, but it’s important to find these things out before it goes mainstream.

So here are my favourite examples from 2012:

The cARe project explores two examples of Augmented Reality (AR) with a focus on nursing students, after working as an educational technologist in a nursing department this really did interest me. This blog post will give you a nice overview: http://blogs.city.ac.uk/care/2012/11/09/188/ . Farzana Latif, Education Technology Project Manager and AR Developer, also organised a great AR event earlier in the year which brought people, interested in AR, together.  I also like this project because it was funded through the Jisc Evaluator pitches, which meant rapid development but backed by a great idea. Follow Farzana on Twitter @farzanalatif

A new project to watch is the work at Kendal College with plumbing students. It’s part of the FE and Skills Development and Resources Programme that will see some great new resources developed on the back off existing Jisc resources, many of which will be deposited into Jorum. Judy Bloxam (@gingerblox) from the RSC NW has recently written this article about AR and the work at Kendal College. I don’t know a great deal about the project but with my interest in AR and in skills subjects I am certain we will be able to learn from this work. I’ll be attending their webinar tomorrow.

Of course I must mention the work we are doing at Mimas, most people know about the work at the University of Manchester – Scarlet which won a team award at ALT-C this year – but you might be less aware of the excellent work with the University of Sussex and the University for the Creative Arts. The project (Scarlet+ named so because it’s all about adding AR skills to other institutions) subject areas ranges from Thatcher’s Britain to British crafts. You might also be interested to know that we have also been looking at the use of AR in medicine, with Hairdressing Training and most recently  with Landmap, check our our Pinterest board for some examples.

Follow us @team_scarlet or me @lauraar

Other people to follow if you want to know what’s going on with AR in education:

Jo Alcock @joeyanne for Library related AR applications

Mark Power @markpower  from Jisc CETIS

‏Other members of the Scarlet+ team @SussexSpeccoll and @CSC_UCA

Recent related articles:

Jisc Inform Issue 35, an article entitled ‘What’s real any more?‘

CILIP Multimedia Information and Technology Group (MMIT) has recently released a special edition of their journal on mobile technologies.

Thanks

I’ve worked with some fantastic people on AR this year and really hope to be saying a lot more about AR in education by 2014. Please do contact me at Mimas if you have more examples, if you want to work with on AR in education projects or need some training.