Post date: June 12, 2019

this is a heads-up of a coming Call for Papers.

My co-editor - Sebastian Habig - and I cordially invite you to consider a contribution to a forthcoming Special Section of the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) on the theme of 'Beyond observation and interaction: Augmented Reality through the lens of constructivism and constructionism' :-)

Motivation and Scope

Since its inception, BJET has been a leading resource in the dissemination of research pertaining to critical evaluations of the affordances of a diversity of technologies to learning and to education. Since the mid-2000s, a major strand which has emerged has been the potential roles which technologies of augmented reality play in different learning contexts (e.g. Bell, 2009; Cai, Liu, Yang, & Liang, 2019; Cheng & Tsai, 2016; Lai, Chen, & Lee, 2019; Liu & Tsai, 2013; Nadolny, 2017). This strand traces its roots variously from – inter alia – embodied cognition, phenomenology and social constructivism. For the past decade or so, explorations in this field have suggested that the promise thereof is tempered by the relative lack of scalability of such interventions, in terms of – for example – the cost of capital as well as the learning curve and its consequential costs of time. It has only in the past year or so that the potential costs of both have begun to level off and show indications of falling, as – for example – open-source technologies and the capabilities of recent smartphones have progressed. In an increasing number of contexts for learning, specialised equipment need no longer be purchased, and the authoring of the learning objects is becoming increasingly democratized.

We are therefore keenly interested in proposing this Special Section which will focus on the affordances of augmented reality in learning. We believe that such an Special Section published in 2020 will stand to chart for BJET’s readership the crest just as it is about to break, as learning mediated by augmented reality becomes possible with the handsets and smart devices which learners already have in their pockets. We are interested to map the lay of the land as what was once peripheral becomes increasingly appropriated in to pedagogical cores. We believe that the Special Section we propose will help us to achieve this vision.

Topics that would be of relevance to this issue include, but are not limited to:

- Constructivist perspectives on the design of learning environments which leverage the affordances of augmented reality

- Early initiatives in augmented reality as a means of constructionism in learning

- Critical analyses of curriculum design paradigms which seek / have sought to incorporate augmented reality

- Perspectives on scaling learning interventions with augmented reality

- Open-source and the evolution of augmented reality for learning

- Mixed-reality learning environments with a focus on augmented reality

Submission instructions

Interested authors are requested to submit manuscripts by 1 September 2019 via email to kenneth.lim AT nie DOT edu DOT sg