{"id":5486,"date":"2016-02-25T08:57:24","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T08:57:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=5486"},"modified":"2016-02-22T09:02:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T09:02:45","slug":"living-in-a-mixed-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/2016\/02\/living-in-a-mixed-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in a Mixed Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

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David Watson is an Instructional Design Specialist at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University with 8 years of experience in UK Higher Education, providing technological and instructional expertise in numerous online projects and teaching and learning. \u00a0His role at PolyU is focused on areas such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Augmented & Virtual Reality (AR\/VR), Game-Based Learning (GBL), CPD delivery and the development of various funded instructional technologies.<\/p>\n

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Living in a mixed reality<\/h3>\n

So 2016 is the year in which Virtual Reality (VR) finally<\/em>\u00a0takes off, and that potentially could have a pretty exciting impact on education at all levels. \u00a0From Quick Reference (QR) Codes to Second Life and 3D Virtual Worlds we now arrive at the anticipated launch of Oculus Rift and the like, promising that \u2018you\u2019ve never experienced immersion like this,’ but haven’t we heard that before? \u00a0Rewinding a little bit, the 2011 New Media Consortium Horizon Report predicted the adoption of Augmented Reality (AR) to be 2-3 years, making 2014 a safe bet for us to be walking around our campuses with our devices held high, however that\u2019s not quite<\/em>\u00a0what happened. \u00a0With Lucking & Fraser (2011) claiming that Augmented Reality can “bridge the learning gap between abstract descriptions and the real world phenomena,” I am intrigued as to why AR isn’t seen more widely in Teaching & Learning.<\/p>\n

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AR is a platform to redefine learning<\/h3>\n

I have always been fascinated with the ‘lean forward experience,’ students and academics alike actively engaging with content, after-all\u00a0I’m\u00a0sure I am not alone in saying that I have sat through enough boring lectures in my time, yearning for some excitement in my learning that chances are I would have not bothered going to the next one. It seems that Puentedura (2009) felt the same way “…no real challenge or change; little advantage is taken of the possibilities for technology to transform the act of learning.” \u00a0Think of it from the students point of view, they have their iPhones, iPads and Laptops with them at all<\/em> times and waiting for them at home they have their PlayStations and Xbox – shouldn’t our aim as instructors to be to at least try<\/em> to surpass that cognitive stimulation? \u00a0I know it seems an exhaustive if not impossible proposition, but the learning experience is a different game now.<\/p>\n

I began looking into AR at my previous HE institution in the UK and embarked on a project to incorporate it into clinical skills, before which the usual trawl through our beloved ‘white papers’ found some\u00a0interesting\u00a0points regarding the pedagogy and impact of AR:<\/p>\n