Research into active learning classrooms (ALCs)—spaces explicitly designed to support and promote this kind of learning and pedagogy—is expanding. This research provides educators with insights about how best to implement active learning pedagogies and support learners in ALCs. Studying how pedagogy and physical space can influence each other, researchers assess how well design elements work and how they affect learning. Higher education needs to know why active learning works, how it works best, and how these methods can be adopted more widely. Research that shows the efficacy of ALCs helps advance the use of such spaces and informs improvements in the design of learning spaces.
Augmented reality can be described as experiencing the real world with an overlay of additional computer generated content. In contrast, virtual reality immerses a user in an entirely simulated environment, while mixed or merged reality blends real and virtual worlds in ways through which the physical and the digital can interact. AR, VR, and MR offer new opportunities to create a psychological sense of immersive presence in an environment that feels real enough to be viewed, experienced, explored, and manipulated. These technologies have the potential to democratize learning by giving everyone access to immersive experiences that were once restricted to relatively few learners.
3 Ways AR Can Benefit the Enterprise: 1. Advanced ways to interact with data and training materials: In today’s world of Big Data, knowledge workers, manufacturing employees, and others are required to take on a number of data-intensive tasks: accessing, analyzing, and acting on large quantities of information, all while tackling the everyday collaboration and communication tasks of a normal work day. For employees in a number of industries, AR has the potential to be a game-changer in how employees interact with and share information because the technology overlays digital information over a user’s view of the real world.
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2. Increased sales opportunities: For those brands who want to deliver richer customer experiences and increase sales, AR offers plenty of opportunities to transform the way that ustomers purchase products.
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3. Enhanced model visualization: One useful ability of AR’s technological potential for the enterprise revolves around its 3D technology.
It’s something the theater is hoping to change with the help of Epson’s latest smart glasses. This week it launched a trial that will see deaf and hearing-impaired customers supplied with the eyewear, which displays subtitles in their field of vision wherever they’re sitting.
“The problem we’re aiming to solve is the lack of choice and the customer experience — it’s twofold,” Jonathan Suffolk, the theater’s technical director, said in an interview. The smart glass tech, he said, “gives customers the chance to come anytime they want, matinee or evening, and sit anywhere they want in any size theater.”
Like other technologies, AR has the potential to be a powerful constructivist learning technology that supports the personalized learning goals of students by bringing scannable content to life in an engaging and cost effective manner.
For a generation that’s been raised on interactive technologies, bringing AR into the classroom and curriculum can also help encourage active engagement and contribute to student retention.
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Here are a few top picks for introducing and creating AR experiences in the classroom.
I strongly believe that presence is the quality that makes Virtual Reality unique as a medium. Yet, analytical approaches to presence from a creative standpoint have been lacking. Let’s fix that.
Though it’s geared toward 360° filmmaking, we also wanted to get creators thinking about conceiving and composing VR experiences with an eye toward the medium’s future. We’re guessing many readers fall into a similar camp, so we decided to make this resource available to the public—think of it as something like, “VR Writing and Storytelling 201.”
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In other words, your audience will feel an increased sense of responsibility—these questions of Why am I here? and What should I do? This is why games and genre stories that focus on intentions (rescuing something; capturing something; escaping something; solving something) work particularly well.
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The nuts-and-bolts part of presence is point of view (POV). In 360° storytelling, you must directly address the question of which specific POV you will utilize in your story. Will your audience see things through a specific character’s eyes (first-person POV) or will you simply take on an “objective,” detached perspective (third-person POV)?
We can’t express this enough: the space is as (if not more) important than your plot and characters. While composing your story, think about the ways you can build environments capable of making the viewer imagine stories of their own—even without any other human beings in the picture.
With ARKit already baked into the mobile operating system of “hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads,” the massive potential install base means there’s plenty of reasons for developers to start making new augmented reality apps for Apple’s App Store. Now Udacity, the for-profit online education site that was spawned from free Stanford University computer science classes, has created a course that says will take you one month to complete so you can start making your own AR apps for iOS.
From DSC: Again, how many of these types of courses/programs are in the works right now throughout traditional institutions of higher education? My guess? Very few.
If you are at all interesting in emerging technologies and what several pieces
of our future learning ecosystems — and meeting spaces — could easily look like,
you NEED to watch the entire presentation.
The era of Windows Mixed Reality begins October 17— from blogs.windows.com by Alex Kipman Samsung unveils Windows Mixed Reality headset, AltSpaceVR joins Microsoft, SteamVR catalog coming to Windows Mixed Reality this holiday.
At an event in San Francisco we unveiled our vision for Windows Mixed Reality, announced SteamVR and AltSpaceVR are coming to Windows Mixed Reality, introduced the new Samsung Odyssey HMD, and kicked off the holiday shopping season by announcing the availability of pre-orders for Windows Mixed Reality headsets at the Microsoft Store.
Microsoft held its long-awaited launch of Windows 10 Mixed Reality yesterday, and while most of the new devices and products had been leaked earlier, there were still some big takeaways. Here are some of them:
Mixed Reality: Microsoft gave a demo of what its new platform will do, covering the AR/VR spectrum with games, apps, and experiences. One such experience is Cliff House, a virtual work space and entertainment room.
Altspace VR: When the pioneering social VR app shut down this summer and was rescued by a “third party,” people wondered who that was. Turns out it was Microsoft, which acquired Altspace VR for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition was announced yesterday.
Steam VR and Halo: Microsoft had previously announced that its new Mixed Reality headsets would support Steam VR titles. Developers can now access that support, and consumers will be able to access it later this year. In addition to the hundreds of VR titles available on Steam, on Oct. 17, Microsoft will offer free downloads of Halo Recruit.
Odyssey and other headsets: The new Windows 10 platform is launching alongside a host of new headsets. In addition to the new Odyssey, which was made in partnership with Samsung, there are other headsets forthcoming from Acer, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Asus.
2018 Olympics: This was announced previously in June, but yesterday Microsoft briefed the press that Intel is partnering with the International Olympic Committee to bring Windows Mixed Reality experiences to the 2018 games.
Watch the Google Pixel 2 event in 19 minutes — from the verge.com by Natt Garun The Google Pixel event has wrapped and we got a good look at a bunch of new hardware lineup this year: the second generation of Pixel smartphones, new Google Homes, a Pixelbook, and a surprise new Google camera that uses artificial intelligence to snap pictures and videos of your family. Is it as weird as it sounds? If you missed the keynote where Google presented everything, here’s a recap of everything Google announced in about two hours cut into a 19-minute video so you can see for yourself if these new products will make it to your shopping list this holiday season.
As L&D, we need to change the way we manage learning and training for our new and existing workforce. In fact, you should give up the idea of managing their learning at all! It is not your responsibility anymore. Instead, aim to create a culture of continuous learning and curiosity. Equip your employees with technology and tools that encourage them to collaborate, connect, and learn when they need to. You can no longer treat work and learning as different entities, because your employees need to learn all the time if you want to retain your competitive edge. They need to soak in all the information coming to them from all around and apply it to their work.
You will need to help build a technology-enabled learning ecosystem to support this trend of self-learning.
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Your employees are no longer limited to learning at a specific time in a physical venue. Mobile devices and learning apps have ensured that learners can access learning content whenever and wherever they wish. They can choose their own learning path and mode of learning—videos, podcasts, text-based content, game-based modules, and so on. Learning should be a personal endeavor. If you allow your learners to choose what they wish to learn, then they can decide on the skills they need in order to excel in the real world. This gives more power to your content and makes learning meaningful to the learners.
Here are the top four trends that you should keep in mind while working on your corporate training strategy.
Amazon and tech training app Codecademy have collaborated to create a series of free courses. Available today, the courses are meant to train developers as well as beginners how to create skills, the voice apps that interact with Alexa.
Since opening Alexa to third-party developers in 2015, more than 20,000 skills have been made available in the Alexa Skills Store.
This week, the The Deep Learning Summit and AI Assistant Summit saw over 450 DL and AI experts and enthusiasts come together to learn from each other and explore the most recent research and progressions in the space. Over the past two days we’ve heard from the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Vodafone, as well as Universities such as Cambridge, Warwick, UCL, Imperial, and exciting new startups like Jukedeck and Echobox. Topics have been incredibly diverse covering NLP, space exploration, ML for music composition, and many more.
We’ve collected some of our favourite takeaways from both tracks over the last two days, as well as hearing what our attendees thought.
What did we hear at the AI Assistant Summit? I’m driving in France and google translate is automatically translating all the french road signs for me and directing me to my location, telling me my time of arrival – this is the future. There is no interface there is no screen. Adi Chhabra, Evolution of AI & Machine Learning in Customer Experience – Beyond Interfaces, Vodafone
… We are at the beginning of the era of assistance. In the future every employee will have an assistant to help him with decision making.
Christophe Bourguignat, Deep Learning for Conversational Intelligence on Analytics Data, Zelros
The combination of rapidly-accumulating research on the effectiveness of active learning combined with improvements in technology have created an ideal environment for almost any instructor to move their courses from a traditional to a flipped model.
Many articles on flipped learning contain misconceptions that can lead potential practitioners into error or away from using flipped learning entirely, to the detriment of their students and themselves.
This article looks at some of the myths about flipped learning and provides contradictory facts about this pedagogical approach.
Flipped learning, sometimes called the “flipped classroom,” is a pedagogical approach which uses time and space in a different way from the way courses are typically taught. In traditional instruction, students’ first contact with new ideas happens in class, usually through direct instruction from the professor; after exposure to the basics, students are turned out of the classroom to tackle the most difficult tasks in learning — those that involve application, analysis, synthesis, and creativity — in their individual spaces. Flipped learning reverses this, by moving first contact with new concepts to the individual space and using the newly-expanded time in class for students to pursue difficult, higher-level tasks together, with the instructor as a guide.
Flipped learning is a pedagogical approach whose time has come. The combination of rapidly-accumulating research on the effectiveness of active learning combined with improvements in technology have created an ideal environment for almost any instructor to move their courses from a traditional to a flipped model. At the same time, despite its popularity and the efforts of groups like the Flipped Learning Network to explain and operationalize flipped learning, it remains a somewhat poorly-understood concept among many. Many published articles on flipped learning contain misconceptions that can lead potential practitioners into error or away from using flipped learning entirely, to the detriment of their students and themselves.
Let’s take a look at some of the myths about flipped learning and try to find the facts.
Is VR the future of employee training? — from biztechmagazine.com by Phil Goldstein UPS, Walmart and other companies are experimenting with virtual reality to prepare and coach workers.
Excerpt:
VR is becoming an increasingly common training tool for a variety of businesses. Although the relatively new tactic is not widespread, its proponents say it is the wave of the future. The latest company to adopt VR training is UPS, which recently announced plans to roll out the technology to instruct student parcel delivery drivers.
Executives at companies that use VR for training say that the technology provides users with immersive experiences that simulate real-world examples and situations they are likely to face on the job. That makes them better prepared for when they swap the headsets for the road, warehouse or store floor.
UPS Tests VR Training for Drivers This month, UPS will start training student delivery drivers to spot and identify road hazards using VR headsets at its nine UPS Integrad training facilities.
Tap through the app’s catalogue of over 2,000 products—nearly the company’s full collection of umlauted sofas, armchairs, coffee tables, and storage units—then hold up your phone and use the camera to place the digital furniture anywhere in a room. Want to see how the Strandmon winged chair looks by the window? Done. Can you really squeeze in that 7-foot-long area rug? Open the app, point your camera at the floor, and watch it appear at scale. You can even place a futon where it would go in the guest room, then see what it looks like when it unfolds into a bed.
Ikea built the app with Apple’s ARKit, a developer toolkit created to usher in the augmented reality revolution on iOS devices. The app is free and available now, as long as your iPhone is updated to iOS 11.
One of the biggest features to come to iOS 11 is ARKit, enabling developers to open up your world to a whole new kind of gaming and discovery system. Instead of being limited to the screen, you can play on surfaces big and small and you can play with others. The only thing limiting you right now is not knowing which ARKit apps are out there right now, so you can dive in and see which apps are your new favorite.
Searching Apple’s massive App Store can take a long time, so we’ve compiled a big friendly list for you to pick out the real winners!
The majority of these apps are still at the demo stage for now, but it’s not difficult to see the potential. Games can take place in the real world, whether that’s on your living room floor or around your neighborhood, while you’ll be able to imagine anything from a new sofa to a new house extension through your phone’s camera.
Further down the line you’ll be able to point your phone at anything and get information overlaid about what you’re seeing with a whole new level of accuracy—the distance to the pin on a golf course, the current stats for players out on a baseball field, or precise directions to the store you need in the mall you’ve just got lost in. You can measure distances, land a rocket in your backyard, and so much more.
Of course AR (or “mixed reality”) headsets are going to provide a much more immersive experience and are a more natural fit than having to hold your phone or tablet in front of you to see anything in AR land. Until those headsets hit the mainstream though, ARKit and ARCore are about to introduce millions of people to the potential of augmented reality. Instead of looking down at your phone you’re going to be holding it up to access all the information of the internet with a swipe.
Amazon’s first wearable device will be a pair of smart glasses with the Alexa voice assistant built in, according to a report in the Financial Times. The device will reportedly look like a regular pair of glasses and use bone-conduction technology so that the user can hear Alexa without the need for earphones or conventional speakers. It won’t, however, likely have a screen or camera, although Google Glass founder Babak Parviz has apparently been working on the project following his hiring by Amazon in 2014.
What does Google want with HTC’s smartphone business?— from theguardian.com by Samuel Gibbs Google is acquiring a $1bn chunk of HTC’s smartphone arm, including 2,000 employees and access to intellectual property, as it bets big on hardware
Google isn’t buying the whole of HTC, just a relatively large part of the Taipei-based company’s smartphone business and not itsVive virtual reality headset business. Google gains half of HTC’s research and development team – about 2,000 people – and a non-exclusive license for HTC’s intellectual property, allowing it to take advantage of some of HTC’s advances in smartphone technology.
HTC gets a cash injection, which will help it survive in some very competitive markets, and Google gets to continue its “big bet on hardware” according to Rick Osterloh, the company’s senior vice president for hardware.
It’s “a business decision to have access to one of the best R&D teams”, said Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research. But it’s also “a sort of emotional decision to save its close partners”.
The Washington Post today announced the launch of its first embedded augmented reality story. The Post built an industry-first embed code that lets users trigger an augmented reality experience with 3D visuals and audio narration.
“We were excited to be the first news publisher to support augmented reality in a news application, but for our second iteration in our iconic building series we needed to make augmented reality even simpler,” said Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at The Post. “We’ve been working to reduce the friction to make augmented reality as easily accessible as a photo gallery or a video—those are played inline and augmented reality should be too.”
You can get a sense for what this expansion means in the video below. Ford has already been using HoloLens to help design new cars; bringing 3D models into the real world using the augmented reality headset. Now, however, the company is introducing new processes, like overlaying new features onto existing car models and creating guided tours of cars using voice recording. The company also says it’s developing new apps for better collaboration in AR.
From DSC: The vast majority of the lessons being offered within K-12 and the lectures (if we’re going to continue to offer them) within higher education should be recorded.
Why do I say this?
Well…first of all…let me speak as a parent of 3 kids, one of whom requires a team of specialists to help her learn. When she misses school because she’s out sick, it’s a major effort to get her caught up.As a parent, it would be soooooo great to log into a system and obtain an updated digital playlist of the lessons that she’s missed. She and I could click on the links to the recordings in order to see how the teacher wants our daughter to learn concepts A, B, and C. We could pause, rewind, fast forward, and replay the recording over and over again until our daughter gets it (and I as a parent get it too!).
I realize that I’m not saying anything especially new here, but we need to do a far better job of providing our overworked teachers with more time, funding, and/or other types of resources — such as instructional designers, videographers and/or One-Button Studios, other multimedia specialists, etc. — to develop these recordings. Perhaps each teacher — or team — could be paid to record and contribute their lessons to a pool of content that could be used over and over again. Also, the use of RSS feeds and content aggregators such as Feedly could come in handy here as well. Parents/learners could subscribe to streams of content.
Such a system would be a huge help to the teachers as well. They could refer students to these digital playlists as appropriate — having updated the missing students’ playlists based on what the teacher has covered that day (and who was out sick, at another school-sponsored event, etc.). They wouldn’t have to re-explain something as many times if they had recordings to reference.
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Also, within the realm of higher education, having recordings/transcripts of lectures and presentations would be especially helpful to learners who take more time to process what’s being said. And while that might include ESL learners here in the U.S., such recordings could benefit the majority of learners. From my days in college, I can remember trying to write down much of what the professor was saying, but not having a chance to really process much of the information until later, when I looked over my notes. Finally, learners who wanted to review some concepts before a mid-term or final would greatly appreciate these recordings.
Again, I realize this isn’t anything new.But it makes me scratch my head and wonder why we haven’t made more progress in this area, especially at the K-12 level…? It’s 2017. We can do better.
“Personalized learning seeks to accelerate student learning by tailoring the instructional environment — what, when, how, and where students learn — to address the individual needs, skills, and interests of each student. Students can take ownership of their own learning, while also developing deep, personal connections with each other, their teachers, and other adults.”
WE’VE ALWAYS HAD FOUR STRONG BELIEFS:
Students’ ownership of their learning is critical to long-term success.
When it comes to learning, students should get more of what they need exactly when they need it.
Ensuring equity requires getting each student what he or she needs to succeed.
It is possible to redesign schools to work much better for students and teachers.
We do not believe that there is yet definitive proof that personalized learning works better than other models. Ultimately, we hope that personalized learning will improve life outcomes for students, with clear evidence to support its efficacy. In the interim, we look to traditional academic measures (e.g. state assessments or assessments like NWEA MAP), to provide early signs of the efficacy of personalized learning.
Despite the lack of conclusive proof, there are two important data sets that we find compelling. First, RAND conducted a study of 11,000 students and 62 personalized learning schools nationally and found that “students made significant gains in mathematics and reading overall, and in elementary and middle schools [1].” More recently, RAND published the third of its studies of personalized learning. It again found statistically significant gains in math, however, the effect size had decreased notably [2].
With Google Earth VR, you can go anywhere in virtual reality. Whether you want to stroll along the canals of Venice, stand at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro or soar through the sky faster than a speeding bullet, there’s no shortage of things to do or ways to explore. We love this sense of possibility, so we’re bringing Street View to Earth VR to make it easier for you to see and experience the world.
This update lets you explore Street View imagery from 85 countries right within Earth VR. Just fly down closer to street level, check your controller to see if Street View is available and enter an immersive 360° photo. You’ll find photos from the Street View team and those shared by people all around the world.
It’s that time of year again, and we’re bringing you a special “Back to School” edition of Inside VR & AR. Virtual and Augmented Reality technology is more than just fun and games; there are a lot of apps and tools that are meant to educate and help people learn in an immersive environment. Today’s issue highlights some of the newest educational apps.
