Principal Investigator: Rogers Hall
CoPrincipal Investigator(s): Katie Taylor, Ananda Marin
Organization: Vanderbilt University

Abstract:
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that will help envision the next generation of learning technologies and advance what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Capacity-building (CAP) projects increase the ability of researchers to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and support new capacity in allowing researchers to answer questions about how people learn, how to foster or assess learning, and how to design for learning. The past decade has seen rapid growth in development and wide distribution of location-aware technologies (e.g., GPS in mobile devices), digital mapping tools (e.g., Google maps), and tools for spatial analysis and modeling (e.g., CartoDB). These technologies create new opportunities for linking data on mobility at a personal scale with a growing variety of spatially organized, open, large-scale data sets. This confluence of technological developments creates tremendous potential to design new forms of learning and teaching that incorporate personal mobility in public spaces as both the topic and the means of learning: “Learning on the Move” (LoM).

This project will draw together a community of researchers from different disciplines who are not yet collaborating but who together could contribute to design research that develops and studies LoM as a new genre of learning. An invited workshop will build and use a corpus of case studies of learning and technical development supporting LoM that are contributed by participants, and an associated public website will make this corpus and supporting resources (e.g., data, open source code, informed consent procedures, assessments, a “white paper” written by workshop participants) available to the larger community with research interests in this new genre. The workshop will aggregate the best existing work on LoM, explore what is common and different in this existing work, identify promising directions for research, and document research methods and tools that can be used to further this research. The breadth of the invitees and the resulting LoM corpus from the workshop will provide a substantive, ongoing resource to other researchers in the field.