one of the most happening communities within the geography fraternity is the Digital Geographies research group of the Royal Geographical Society.
this year, their annual symposium will be held on the 21st of June at the University of Birmingham, themed on Mobilities and the Digital. The conference will provide a space to explore a wide range of topics and contexts where mobilities and the digital intersect as well as the broader societal, cultural and political contexts in which these changes occur.
given this, i am so thrilled and thankful to God to be afforded the opportunity to present our team's early thoughts on the affordances for learning of the Apple Vision Pro.
our paper is titled Exploring the affordances of mixed reality in the design of contexts of learning through embodied cognition; its abstract reads:
In the course of a typical day, we traverse our respective campuses several times, sometimes being exposed directly to the elements, while at other times in the shade. The paths we take reflect our tacit responses to such exposure. Through our own bodily experience, we therefore develop over time a textured map of our respective campuses which - in turn - influences our decision-making in subconscious ways.
While the cost of high-end headsets such as that released by Apple in 2024 remain high and therefore mitigate against widespread adoption in contexts of learning, the fact that the company has used the headset to advance a new paradigm of computing – which it calls ‘spatial computing’ – merits examination by the community of geographers. This paper represents an early attempt to do so, in terms of their affordances in the design of contexts of learning through embodied cognition.
Be they considered a spatial computer or a mixed reality headset, the devices lend themselves naturally to the notion of embodiment, in that our auditory and visual sensory inputs are augmented by the affordances of whatever apps we are using, but also that the apps can be designed to have a certain degree of geospatial permanence within the augmented world.
We have termed this approach Learner-Generated Augmentation (Lim et al., 2018), because it describes activities in which the learners are given opportunities to augment their local environments – such as through annotating in Augmented Reality – thereby giving teachers insight in to which aspects of their local environments students find significant and meaningful. The elements in their environments which novices might choose to annotate would be different from those which the teacher (as domain expert) might choose. In the hands of a skilled teacher, such differences represent rich opportunities for discussion and mutual learning.
