The STEM Initiative challenged educational institutions and the foundations that support them to look beyond traditional modes of delivering education. The objective is to seek innovative solutions to prepare students and society for global competitiveness. The goal is enhanced science, technology engineering and mathematics education that lead to career development opportunities for students and better prepares them for a digital and communications centered future. Many states and foundations have taken up this challenge and are engaging is cooperative partnerships toward meeting these aggressive goals.
Imagined Communities meets this challenge.
The goal of Augmented Reality (AR) is to add information and meaning to a real object or place. It deepens the users understanding of a real or created environment. Once combined with the creation of virtual environments, it opens a world of educational opportunity and enables the user to create and alter their environment.
Traditionally, “virtual environments” have been created by professional designers and digital artists at staggering cost, often $10 to $20 thousand dollars per second. But the recent introduction of inexpensive and fairly easy to use tools makes it possible to put these enabling technologies into the hands of schools and students. Through creating their own environments, students experience educational and cognitive outcomes that are difficult to duplicate.
Once a virtual environment is designed, it is augmented with an array of digital information. This information is attached to the virtual and real environment in the form of a “glif”, a simple symbol denoting that additional information is available. The addition of these “glifs” enables unique explorations of any virtual or real environment. Supplementing these explorations with mobile technologies and data-collection devices such as the mobile phone camera function opens a world that simply hasn’t existed.
Imagined Communities brings this world to students and their community. Because every object or place has a history, making that content available provides a rich learning experience. Many, if not most, of these experiences are designed by the students and extended to their community. By exposing students to this experimental and explorative model of learning, augmented reality has the potential to shift modes of learning from students simply being the recipients of content to their taking an active role designing, formatting and processing virtual and very real information. This creates knowledge, altering the way they learn and prepares them to participate in the digital world. It has the power to move learning out of the classroom and into the community that students see as their own.
The Role of the Educational Foundation
In 2009, more than 1,300 foundations awarded nearly 23,000 educational grants worth over $6 billion. In the Arts and Humanities, more the 1,200 foundations awarded nearly 27,000 grants worth over $3.9 billion, in Community Development over 1,000 foundations awarded nearly 19,000 grants worth more the $5.5 billion and in Information Technology and Services over 1,200 foundations awarded grants worth over $1.5 billion. Imagined Communities touches all of these efforts.
Most of the foundation support for education focuses on traditional research and application. Grants trend toward curriculum and faculty development, construction and renovation, and student scholarships and fellowships. Imagined Communities provides an opportunity for foundations to take an innovative approach to education, fundamentally challenging the way cognitive education is approached today.
