from September 2018 till March 2019, i was able to collaborate with a teacher-in-training - Ryan Lim - on an exciting project which situated itself at the intersection of a number of fields, namely: constructionism, semiotics, memory, history education, and augmented reality (AR).
our study sought to build on my earlier work in Learner-Generated Augmentation (first published in Lim, et al. (2018)), to question the dominant design paradigm informing most learning interventions with AR - namely that of an expert-led model of teaching, where the AR artifact is created by a domain expert; under such a paradigm, the learner has limited ownership of the process of artifact production.
Ryan and i chose instead to broaden the application of AR in education, specifically to history education, by exploring the affordances of such technology in mediating student-led learning activities. The current Singapore Secondary History syllabus adopts an inquiry-based approach. The need to memorize key facts is still an important part in formulating historical arguments. The study involved the design of a learning activity to help students memorize historical information more effectively by building upon the established memory technique of Memory Palace / Method of Loci. In this activity, students used a free AR mobile application to sketch constructions of three-dimensional memory palaces of key information from a prose passage.
we believe our work is the first of its kind to position itself at this nexus.
Ryan and i received the heart-warming news today that our work has been accepted for publication in Vol 51 Issue 3 of the British Journal of Educational Technology.
we thank God for His grace and leading along this journey of learning.
