It’s often felt that technology enters the classroom whether teachers like it or not, leaving teachers and schools to avoid engaging with it at their peril. Designed for seamless integration with everyday tasks, wearable technology certainly fits this bill. As the next big push in mobile tech, development in wearables is progressing rapidly, with numerous players both large and small competing to stake out a piece of a growing market. Most are aiming for discreet, lightweight consumer products that are destined to begin flooding classrooms, just as laptop computers and then mobile phones did before them.
However, after a decade and a half of steady infiltration, educators have come to view new technology as an opportunity to enhance learning rather than a mere distraction. In a recent study researchers learned that higher education experts readily identified potential pedagogical uses for wearable technologies; in situ contextual information, recording, and simulation capabilities topped the list.
What sets wearables apart from other forms of technology?
In polling educators, researchers also discovered that for all the excitement surrounding technological innovation, it’s sometimes difficult to visualize the potential of new technologies. Wearables have not yet seen wide adoption, so the most useful and popular applications have yet to be established. I find it helpful to break out the dominant functions currently being researched for wearable tech to get a sense of the direction that applications may take.
There are several key advantages to be gained in placing technology in proximity to the body of the user.
Wearables can monitor the human body. Long-standing body-sensing technologies such as heart monitors are among the first to be integrated with miniaturized computing components adapted from the smartphone. Devices such as the Fitbit incorporate motion-sensors, GPS and heart rate to produce a fully functional fitness app that tracks progress. The Muse headset incorporates EEG sensors into a headband to monitor cognitive states of focus and distraction as an aid to meditation. Instructors could gain valuable feedback from students throughout a lesson by monitoring engagement based on heart rate, direction of gaze, and cognitive focus.
Educational philosophy will play a vital role in potential applications of this functionality to pedagogy. The challenge here is to use monitoring without being invasive. While some might argue for the value in anticipating and preventing “meltdowns” in children at school, monitoring personal information in a university setting would likely be seen as inappropriate and patronizing. Consumer apps will likely set the tone for educational uses – while quantified self makes sense, quantified others raises privacy issues.
Technology can be hands-free. In freeing up the user’s hands, wearable technology provides new freedom to interact with the real environment and move freely in space while remaining connected to the device’s functionality. Go Pro cameras are an early implementation of consumer-focused, hands-free documentation capabilities. Currently, wearable tech is also moving toward taking advantage of environment-sensing features, addressing barriers to communication and control by integrating open-air gestures.
Educational applications of hands-free wearables can be either student- or teacher-focused. As cameras become seamlessly integrated into traditional formats such as glasses, students will be able to record lectures and avoid missing information while taking notes. In the sciences, professors look forward to being able to demonstrate dangerous experiments at a safe distance from students without losing the first-person perspective.
Wearables improve immersion. Wearable technology has a special relationship with the user’s visual field. Not only can wearables free up the hands, they can also augment the visual field by overlaying heads-up displays (HUD), projecting holographic objects, or enclosing the user in a 3D virtual environment. Projects such as the Virtual Human and Minecraft Hololens are an exciting glimpse of what’s possible in the very near future.
Integration is a compelling value proposition. A great deal of the value of wearables lies in the integration of traditional mobile functionality such as GPS, messaging and chat. In addition, the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) is developing in tandem with wearable technology, opening up exciting avenues for further assimilation of information and mediated interaction. Combining environment sensing, body sensing, IoT and Augmented Reality can increase the amount of information available to the user without increasing physical clutter. Imagine cooking with a recipe on the sidebar of an HUD, a timer running in the bottom corner, current oven temperature, and so on, all accessible without moving away from your cutting board. With time, we are likely to see projects devoted to the enhancement of lab experiments through internet-ready equipment, though such complete integration is still some ways off.
A device is nothing without content
While wearable devices have been around for several years, the development of applications has lagged behind, in part because the technology is so rapidly changing. Gaming applications are a clear avenue for early investment in content. Entertainment is fuelled by novelty, and few consumers are willing to make a major outlay for something that isn’t going to be fun right from the getgo. And compared to 3D printing applications, for example, the development of convincing virtual reality content can be very difficult.
However, not all platforms are created equal. Alongside early (and expensive) consumer products such as the Vive gaming headset and Microsoft’s Hololens is the deceptively simple Google Cardboard platform. A sturdy cardboard frame mounts dual lenses to a smartphone, enabling 3-dimensional exploration of computer-generated environments or special videos shot with a 360° camera. Stunning virtual experiences such as A Land of Giants – Sequoia National Park can be accessed via Youtube. The accessibility of camera equipment and the universal platform of Youtube promise a steady flow of new user-developed content for Google Cardboard.
New technology is expensive – are we ready to adopt?
The cost of the most advanced wearable technology is currently prohibitively high. For now, the barrier to entry makes it unfeasible to incorporate student-centered wearable content beyond what’s available through Google Cardboard. For technology enthusiasts, early classroom applications could focus on use by teachers to provide first-person perspective on small objects or complex procedures, streamed from a single headset to smartphones and laptops throughout the class.
It’s instructive to compare wearable technology with another up-and-coming new technology – 3D printing. Fundamentally, current wearable technology is about spectacle, or at best, interactive display; 3D printing much more directly fosters creation and innovation. Financially, the value to an institution of a 3D printing lab is likely much greater than the investment required to acquire enough wearable devices to be of use to either staff or the student body.
3D printing brings the virtual into the physical realm; currently, wearable technology does the reverse. Perhaps an unforeseen consequence of the proliferation of wearables will be the premium that can be placed on real experience. The value of reality will go up, not down, as it becomes cheaper to replace it with alternatives.
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