A friend of mine and I were discussing how cool it would be to situate learning experiences within the real world environment. This would be especially exciting for those instances when you are stuck doing things as a captive audience. For example, if you were on the bus or driving on a road trip in the passenger seat, why not learn something along the way.
Well we are almost there. I stumbled across an article in the Upside Learning blog which discussed augmented reality and showed how improvements in mobile technology have made it possible to capture live images and upload related information about the area.
I think we are hitting the tip of the iceberg for this type of learning. If the tools are easy enough to generate content, you could create learning experiences which are actually in the field and outside of the classroom. You could create geology lessons that are situated in the location in which you are hiking. You could create training related to locations in the building to improve performance in that instance. The key would be to take these learning materials past the "cool" factor into trying to achieve and measure student performance on learning outcomes.
