Abstract:

Imagine a world where your car contacts your home’s air conditioning system to tell it that you’ll be home an hour earlier than normal and it should switch itself on in 15 minutes time. Or the air conditioning system in your home informs you that because of change in the weather it has turned the cooling on an hour earlier than scheduled. This is not far-fetched - it is all possible today. It’s called the ‘Internet of Things’ and it has the potential to be a truly life-changing technology.
What exactly is the Internet of Things? Well, in simple terms, the Internet of Things describes objects - including vehicles, portable devices, environmental sensors, traffic sensors and all kinds of consumer goods – that have the ability to sense things and communicate with one another. Market research firms project as many as 50B devices connected by 2020. So on an average, we are talking about 7-10 devices per person on the planet. That is a lot of devices - specially bearing in mind the potential of kind of use cases these devices can serve - from controlling the home equipment, to talking to cars remotely, to managing one's medical equipment in a timely fashion, to having access to information and entertainment from anywhere.
The Internet of things has the potential of changing all aspects of one's life, including the potential of taking learning and educational experiences to new heights. Learning has already been taken beyond books through computer and Internet. Now we are talking about taking learning with oneself anywhere, everywhere with various connected device one possesses. Let us look at a couple scenarios here.
First: a use case for ease of access to resources. If students are collecting data out in the field for research, tagging physical objects to find and analyze data about the object is one way the Internet of Things can be used in education. Once the students have set up the process (tagging the item, associating certain data and comments to feed that data to other servers for analysis), they can sit back, collect the data and run it through various programs for their research. Having to go out to the physical object all the time to collect data on diferent conditions will be a thing of the past. The students will have 24 hour data collection, which will make their research more accurate.
Next: a use case for efficiency in putting information to use. Say a student created a work of art. She can tag that painting with the time, date, location it was painted, the media that was used for the painting, an audio artist statement, etc. This can be done with a viewer scanning an Augmented Reality (AR) code and viewing that data as AR data. Students would be able to see the images superimposed on top of the real physical object and compare the two in the same exact space. There will be no need for the viewer to pull out their phone, look up the artist and the painting information and try to find interviews about the piece. It will all be tagged to that object.
Just like for everything else, every virtue is associated with vices - the Internet of Things is no exception. All the power and privileges granted to students need to be tightly secured and monitored in order for the technology not to be abused. In this paper, we will not only examine the immense potential of the Internet of Things in heightening learning experiences, but also how it should be implemented for becoming an effective and powerful means for education!

Keywords:

Internet of Things, learning from machines, learning from personalized devices, learning everywhere, ehancing learning experiences.