Thursday, May 26, 2011

Augmented Reality and Learning

Augmented Reality seems to have hit the headlines. And if you aren't sure what that is, the ever popular Rory Cellan-Jones, has just produced an article for the BBC website explaining everything.

If you consider this technology through the eyes of Corporate Learning the potential impacts for Employee Performance Support (EPS) and Just In Time learning are massive; even truly mind boggling; especially in a technical environment and product rich environment where the learners could even be the customer.
But, who in the e-learning world is ready to address this opportunity?
With all the fixation on mobile content being about taking more traditionally focussed push and pull traditional materials to the learner, and collaboration this is obviously an opportunity for someone to exploit.
But, to some extent for developers of this Learning Content, it also means thinking about how you manage learning content very differently from how you do today. It will mean meta-tagging, data warehousing a rich set of assets... and I can't see most e-learning developers both internally for externally being nimble enough to be thinking less about layout on the screen and nice story based interactions and more about creating a rich, contextual learning ecosystem that is triggered at point of contact.
Augmented Reality could really revolutionise the way everyone one learns... and shift the reality of everyone in L&D... particularly those who have a product or physical context, but it means rethinking what the training departments is about and how it fundamentally operates...
Goodbye Articulate......
Hello... ????? well.. who knows...