Putting Education Back Into Place: Exploring the Potential of Locative Learning Through Mobile Technologies

The Factory Model of education in the early 1900s swept farmers from the fields and brought them into nondescript rooms, where they were lined up in rows, forced to face forward, graded like meat, and formally indoctrinated into the prevailing Industrial views of society. A century later, this consolidated model of learning is fracturing under the decentralizing forces of cloud-based Internet technologies, especially through networked smartphones with locative capabilities. As these devices better to get to know their users, and where their users are at, they also are opening up emerging informal learning opportunities. The potential for new forms of immersive and interactive place-based learning creates the sensation of embarking on a never-ending field trip with the Library of Alexandria in your pocket. The half-day workshop presented here will provide an overview of such mobile place-based learning developments, like a Locative 101 class, sharing a sampling of field studies, research projects, and apps, to provide grounding in the field, and direct experimentation with locative media in learning contexts as well as reflection and discussion about those experiences.