Facilitating Place-Based Learning in Outdoor Informal Environments with Mobile Computers

This paper advocates for place-based education to guide research and design for mobile computers used in outdoor informal environments (e.g., backyards, nature centers and parks). By bringing together research on place-based education with research on location awareness, we developed three design gu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTechTrends Vol. 58; no. 1; pp. 77 - 83
Main Authors Zimmerman, Heather Toomey, Land, Susan M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Boston Springer US 2014
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Education
Educational Technology
Handheld Devices
Informal Education
Learning and Instruction
Original Paper
Outdoor Education
Place Based Education
Portable computers
Science Education
Science Projects
Studies
Technology Uses in Education
Telecommunications
Theory Practice Relationship
Virtual reality
United States > US
informal learning
place-based education
theory- to-practice
learning environments
outdoor education
mobile computers
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Summary:This paper advocates for place-based education to guide research and design for mobile computers used in outdoor informal environments (e.g., backyards, nature centers and parks). By bringing together research on place-based education with research on location awareness, we developed three design guidelines to support learners to develop robust science-related understandings within local communities. The three empirically- derived design guidelines are: (1) Facilitate participation in disciplinary conversations and practices within personally-relevant places, (2) Amplifying observations to see the disciplinary-relevant aspects of a place, and (3) Extending experiences through exploring new perspectives, representations, conversations, or knowledge artifacts. Last, we link theory to practice by illustrating how the three guidelines were applied in one outdoor science learning project called Tree Investigators.
ISSN:8756-3894
1559-7075
DOI:10.1007/s11528-013-0724-3