Abstract:

The digital education continues to grow. It holds an enormous potential for learners and learning industry. However, digital education still faces some foundational challenges in sparking learning, connecting people and authentic environments. In worst scenario, the digital education remains distant and fails to deliver its ultimate purpose serving learners in personal growth and sharing new knowledge and skills.

Seemingly, place-based education and digital learning seem not compatible pedagogical approaches. Place-based education connects learning process with the physical place and its meanings, engaging with knowledge and skills embedded in local communities. Instead, virtual learning happens online, and learning can happen independently of locality. Virtual learning contents and processes can fade out the places. On the contrary in virtual learning environments, geographical locations, including their social settings can also play a unique and interactive role. The involvement or interaction of social and geographical communities and environments in virtual learning can be especially rewarding for learning. Combining digital and place-based education that is rooted in unique local communities, environments and socioeconomic places can at best create rich learning experiences by providing access to dynamic, holistic information and immersive learning. This paper addresses this practical problem by mapping solutions how digital tools and place-based educational approaches are currently being combined. Three diverse cases combining digital and place based education are selected purposefully. These solutions are then analyzed in terms of what kind of interaction and roles they facilitate for teacher, individual learner or learner a group. Initial theoretical approaches are put forward for exploring the relationship between these two phenomena. The study offers future research propositions and recommendations for practitioners.

Keywords:

Digital learning, place-based education.