Abstract:

The digital transformation has pervaded many areas of our daily lives. One of these areas is the school education system. Digitization plays a prominent role in the processes of change. We can strengthen a traditional understanding of education by means of “digitally wrapped educational media” or use it as a catalyst for a progressive pedagogy.

We will discuss a new system concept for digitally enabled teaching and learning environments that include already existing media concepts and enables a pedagogy that is only possible through the new digital media. Our basic concepts for this learning environment have been based on contemporary, recognised pedagogical theories, such as those described in "Assisted Learning" by the Arnold (2011) or "Expansive Learning" by Engeström (2016), showing that learning processes are less and less dependent on teaching content and more on the active process of learning itself. Thus, self-driven and creative learning supported by a digitally enriched, modular learning environment is of high importance. Technical, methodological, and social competencies need to be considered together as they influence the individual development of learners to a high degree. It will be about a learning culture that favors forms of self-organized and self-directed learning. Learning is increasingly oriented towards a living learning process in which the learner develops and discovers new and different stimuli and content. In this context, joint learning and references to the “real world” are important.

How can this be supported? For more than 10 years we developed a platform and environment called Ambient Learning Spaces (ALS) in a series of research projects, which enables individuals as well groups of learners to create, share, distribute and reuse semantically annotated media in a social process.

The NEMO framework (Network Environment for Multimedia Objects) forms the technological backend for the Ambient Learning Spaces. It is a semantically modelled, cloud-based multimedia repository for rich media learning applications. It enables the creation of semantically annotated multimedia content to be used across different learning applications developed for NEMO.

NEMO-based learning applications can be used on mobile or stationary interactive systems (domes, large screens, mobiles, wearables). The media (text, image, video, 3D) can be reused in the different learning applications and will be adapted automatically for the different devices with different media capabilities. Interaction methods reach from direct manipulation interfaces on touch displays to augmented reality or 360° interactive applications.

In the ALS-Portal, learners edit their own media and annotate them semi-automatically. The teachers select and manage the learning applications and prepare the teaching content for their pedagogical purposes. A large number of learning applications support both location-based and mobile learning, all based on NEMO and its semantic media repository. Special user interfaces like tangible media and large multitouch screens as well as mobile media and wearables enable body- and space-related learning in real life contexts inside and outside of schools.

Additionally to the pedagogical background, the paper will describe the structure and function of NEMO, the ALS-Portal and different learning applications together with evaluation results. Besides the school context, ALS has been used in several museums.

Keywords:

Learning Environments, Learning Spaces, Ambient Learning, Multimedia, Progressive Pedagogy.