Designing Online Collaborative Location-Aware Platform for History Learning

Abstract

The emergence of geographic visualization and location aware technologies provides educators and teachers with an opportunity to design more effective instructional materials. Visible Past is an innovative learning and discovery project that integrates mapping services with a content management system and 3D virtual reality capabilities. In addition, the system allows for the connection of physical locations or objects such as books and digital artifacts and documents through 2D codes. Similar to barcodes, they can be read by any camera enabled cell phone triggering information retrieval from the web. This adds an element of portability and of meshing up print based media with digital information to the educational process. This paper describes a recent attempt to integrate a location-aware platform into the high school history curriculum. Authors have reviewed the literature related to online history inquiry activity (i.e. collaborative and reflective learning in history), as well as to newly innovative context-aware learning theory. The process of the module design is described and grounded in the literature. Learning effects and future development paths of proposed technology are discussed.