Browsing by Subject "Jaettu oppiminen"

Recently one can see the increased interest in Finnish society in what appears to be the newest technology and its implementation efforts into education. Although tablets and SMART boards have rapidly become more commonly used tools in education, one must wonder if this is the best that science and technology can offer for learning. This current paper serves as an informative paper on the latest scientific knowledge available on augmented reality’s uses in education and attempts to identify those uses most valuable for shared learning practices in communities of practice. To achieve this, it asks How has augmented reality been used in education as described by recently published studies and What kind of value could the uses identified in the first question have for an educational community of practice. Initially 34 studies went through several layers of screening, results of which are attached to this review. Final research literature consisted of seven evidence-based studies, that featured educational uses for AR and collected user experiences. This research is a systematized literature review. It includes a broader descriptive background section for the core knowledge on AR and communities of practice, followed by interpretation of results for the more specific questions on the topic. Lastly, it suggests further progressive research considerations for future studies on the topic. It appears that the uses for AR in education are very diverse, AR research and application creation is progressively finding novel educational topics, and that mobile-AR has successfully enabled the implementation of AR in education. On the other hand, studies’ sample sizes remain small, the appliance of AR as a broad concept still escapes researchers, the results of AR’s effectiveness in these reviewed studies might only apply in their unique settings, and none of them studied AR’s educational uses on established communities of practice. For all those reasons, I call for more progressive studies and literature reviews with larger sample sizes, comparative results and study settings incorporating shared learning aspects.