With a fellowship from Indiana University's Pervasive Technology Labs (PTL), SLIS Professor Yvonne Rogers will further her research into designing innovative learning experiences using ubiquitous computing and mobile technologies. The award allows Rogers to explore novel forms of learning that move beyond the classroom and that make outdoor and indoor learning experiences more integrated and collaborative.
"The goal," Rogers says, "is to investigate how pervasive environments, such as wi-fi and sensor-based technologies, combined with mobile and stand-alone computational devices, can be designed to bridge more effectively informal and formal learning contexts to enable students, and the general public, to broaden and connect their understandings, reflections and hypotheses when in both real world and classroom settings."
The project, "Promoting Integrated and Collaborative Learning through the Design and Application of Pervasive Technologies," more specifically aims "to encourage students to carry out scientific enquiry in the context of their discovering and exploring of an environment, system or process," Rogers says.
Students might take a field trip, where they study and collect data, but they input the data into a software simulation package back in the classroom. Rogers wants to bridge the gap between the two learning experiences.
"This separation of what are interlinked activities can make it difficult for students to see and understand the connections between what are essentially the same representations and processes, being studied but in different contexts," she explains.
Posted November 12, 2004