Window on the World was a research project, carried out a university in Dubai, that offers a critical investigation into how augmented reality can be used to facilitate dialogic learning and collaboration for deeper, richer readings. The augmented reality presentations incorporate a range of apps to showcase students’ critical reflections.
Window on the World: Augmented Reality and Academic Reading
Are new technologies causing the demise of academic reading or can they be harnessed to support it? In the ‘just Google it’ age, academic reading could seem onerous in comparison to the engaging and accessible web-technologies. Without the instantaneous answers of search engines, some students are not equipped with the skills (or inclination) to strive for deeper, critical readings.
This research project investigated how augmented reality (AR) could be incorporated with an academic reading circles approach to facilitate deeper, critical readings, research and reflections. The reading circles approach allocates students specific reading roles or lenses to investigate texts. The roles include: Leaders, Highlighters, Contextualisers, Connectors and Visualizers (Tyson: 2015). According to these roles, students create AR presentations based on their readings, which involves constructing an app architecture to showcase responses. The AR presentations can be shared via mobile devices, virtual learning platforms, email and social media.
The process is called Window on the World since it opens up views of textual schema, embedded cultural, historical, geographical and social references. This has the potential to enrich online learning through creating vivid, engaging interactions concerning reading.
Research into the use of AR pedagogy has focused on numerous affordances. Kaufmann and Schmalstieg (2003) argue that it boosts student engagement. Dori and Belcher (2005), suggest that it helps to concretize abstract concepts and allows for deeper understandings. Klopfer and Squire (2008) say that it provides more opportunities for authentic learning and appeals to multiple learning styles. Yuen (2011) explains how it makes understanding easier through visualization. For Bujak et al., (2013) it develops critical thinking and problem solving skills. Mahadzir and Phung (2013: 34) suggest AR facilitates perceptual arousal, inquiry arousal, variability, goal orientation, motive matching, familiarity, learning requirements, success opportunities, personal control, intrinsic reinforcement, extrinsic rewards, and equity.
The literature discussing the use of AR for reading also emphasizes motivational factors (Solak & Cakir: 2015; Di Serio et al.:2013), the facilitation of comprehension (Ivanov & Ivanov: 2015), concretizing of abstract concepts (Dori & Belcher, 2005) and the development of critical thinking (Dunleavy, Dede, & Mitchell, 2009), position it as a potentially crucial tool for motivating and improving comprehension levels of academic reading.
For Dunleavy, Dede and Mitchells’ (2014: 735) AR is viewed as a cognitive tool and pedagogical approach primarily situated within constructivist learning theory. They suggest that AR has dialogic affordances. However, limitations include cognitive overload and the challenge of integrating and managing the overall AR experience from designers and teachers’ perspectives.
Yet, the exponential development of AR means some of its features are advancing faster than academics can review it and publish their findings. There is also an assumption that a teacher or designer will produce the AR content whereas this does not have to be the case.
What distinguishes this case study from previous investigations into AR and reading pedagogy is that the framework provides a reading scaffold that explicitly and systematically structures socio-linguistic reading processes. Students also create AR materials to showcase research, findings and critical responses to the reading.
The rationale stems from a commitment to Mello’s (2012) seven principles of Emancipatory Pedagogy (drawing on Friere: 1970).
Within the framework of emancipatory pedagogy (EP), education is not the transmission of knowledge but rather the social construction of knowledge through dialogue. Dialogic learning takes place when a series of principles develop in social interaction including: egalitarian dialogue, cultural intelligence, transformation, instrumental dimension, creation of meaning, solidarity and equality of differences.
This combination of AR and Tyson’s reading approach is termed dialogic technological pedagogy (DTP). It is dialogic since dialogue, critical thinking and debate are key components of the learning process (Alexander: 2010; Doukmak: 2014).
It is critical constructivist research, grounded in both constructivism and critical theory. Even though these theories have interrelated tensions, there are possible correlations, acknowledged by theorists such as Clark (2004) and Brookfield (2005). The case study, using mixed method convergent design, draws on both qualitative and quantitative measures to make meta-inferences regarding the literature and primary data sets. It is a nonequivalent (pre-test and post-test) control-group design (Creswell, 2009: 160) which involves a before and after study with a control and experimental group.
It adheres to Onwuegbuzie & Johnsons’ (2006: 56) concern with legitimation processes and makes gestalt switches between qualitative and quantitative lenses to provide weighting of the central research questions that have both empirical and abstract or psychological dimensions.
Considering the perspectives of Arabic female learners, at a university in the UAE, it is proposed that DTP can increase motivation and reading comprehension levels and this is emancipatory for participants who are also active in the research and reflection processes.
The AR and reading circles facilitated dialogic learning that was bottom-up and driven by the participants’ sense of cultural appropriateness. Incorporating both formal and informal channels of communication, it emerged from the participants’ social networks and practices, providing significant technological, collaborative and problem solving skills that could eventually be used to an advantage in the workplace.
This window on the world enables interactions, despite geographical distances, to expand participants’ dialogic learning interactions and parameters to produce richer, more reflective readings.
References
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