CAMPS

ARcamps were the major focus for the project, where the project team brought together people who were interested in exploring the use of augmented reality in education.

Two ARcamps were held: ARcamp 1.0 in June 2012 and ARcamp 2.0 in May 2013. The ARcamps had two functions: the development of awareness and skills; and creating excitement for dissemination and further implementations of AR in education. The experience of the ARcamps informed the development and delivery of a range of workshops, presentations and other sessions held throughout the world during the project.

ARcamps were run in an unconference format; Design Thinking and the Flipped learning model was at the heart of the process. The project team took the view that we were not the holders of the knowledge that we wanted to disseminate, but instead we planned to use the ARcamps and other workshops to nurture skills, build the community and acknowledge the skills that were out there already. People who came to the ARcamps and workshops had the opportunity to get involved in presenting and leading part of the event.

As the project developed the project team began to see patterns emerging. We extracted a number of what we called themes to provide a conceptual framework for us and for our colleagues in workshops and presentations. These themes helped us all to see the range of possibilities that AR could offer and how AR could be used in higher education.

The 3 Elements and 8 Themes of AR in HE: A conceptual framework for ways of using AR in higher educational contexts

We found that AR was a great tool for hijacking space; a great tool for imagining things that aren’t there; for promoting products, services, even ideas; telling stories through narration; a way of confronting people, so when you look at something and see something that really contrasts with what you expect to see; to inform them or provide information about where they are or what they are looking at; a great tool for revealing the world around us, and for layering data that we cannot see back over the world where it makes most sense; and finally a great tool for simulating processes over the real world to explain how things work or operate.

We saw all of these themes as describing good learning opportunities for us to tap into as educators. For example, confronting someone is a way of creating a really strong memory for that person — it helps them to actually learn something. It can be something as simple as looking through the smartphone’s camera at a Mars Bar or a can of Coke, then swapping the ingredients on the wrapper to show you instead what the effect those ingredients might have on you — confronting people with the damage that might be done, or conveying a message to the consumer.

To clarify our themes and how they might be useful in educational setting, we further organised them under three Elements — Control, Collaborate, and Disrupt.

With controlling augments, the producer (who may also be the consumer in co-created auras) is in control of the situation and the flow of information; collaborative augments rely on the contribution of the participants to draw out the meaning of the situation; and disruptive augments provide some discomfort that can change the participants’ perspective or attitude.

Themes were not exclusive — any exemplar could reflect a number of themes and therefore provide participants with multimodal experiences with a number of different approaches.