This is the first of a two-part series that details a week-long trip to California that included augmented reality, comic books and a David Hasselhoff flashmob.

Last March at SXSW, I had the great opportunity to meet Phylise Banner — the Instructional Design Project Leader at the American Public University System — after an interesting panel on whether augmented reality was a viable interactive engagement platform, or a marketing gimmick.

Our chat back in March centered around the mutual belief that AR can indeed be and effective and engaging tool, particularly around the higher education sector.  Over the course of the last few months we continued to meet and discuss how to start this dialogue more deeply within the education industry, and it culminated when Phylise got us on the docket to present at the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium in San Jose last week on using AR in education.

Entitled “Augmented Reality: Digital Engagement in Education,” our session was more a conversation with the audience than a traditional presentation. We wanted, or better yet, needed the dialogue from the standing-room-only audience that had made their way into our talk to really help us see where the opportunities presented themselves to grow AR as a learning platform.

I showed more common examples of AR in the marketing arena, and a few well-executed examples in a classroom setting, though these samples were few and far between, and seemed to leave audience members wondering how much further it could be pushed.

Phylise addressed learning styles and really lead the discussion with the audience while facilitating the dialogue in a way that hopefully left folks excited about assisting us in growing the platform.  Our takeaway from the session was this: Based on the community of professionals that continue to give us feedback in these types of settings and aid in our research, we want to be able to put together a thoughtful and robust example of an AR platform that can set an example for other institutions and organizations to draw from.

As a result, Phylise and I will be setting up a site in which we post our continual findings, show prototypes and grow the community around the platform.  I’m really excited about it and will post it here once we get it going.  Until then, please feel free to chime in via the comments area.

Tags: Augmented Reality, ET4Online

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Fun Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.