Media-Rich Pervasive Learning

Immersive media enable anytime, anyplace learning, stimulating new educational practices and research.

Explore how this evolves in the 2020 Forecast in Visual Literacy.

Real World Application

In the bottom right corner of the map is another important intersection between core trend The End of Cyberspace and two impact areas: Educators & Learning and Tools & Practices. This zone of the map forecasts the emergence of a new learning environment that breaks the traditional boundaries of time and place. Media-Rich Pervasive Learning is about anytime, anyplace learning. It builds off of a major shift in technological paradigm from a focus on “the box” (the computer or TV and the screen) to a focus on context—our physical location, the information we can access, and the people to whom we can connect, physically and virtually. The new learning in digitally enriched physical spaces revitalizes kinetic learning and the opportunities for learning through emotion and movement.

Some key trends driving this new learning environment are:

• Personal, digital media: These are collaborative, social, and interactive media such as web logs (a form of online journals that link to other digital resources), wikis (web pages that anyone can edit and change), and social book-marking (applications that let users share their bookmarked web pages). These media enable individuals to express themselves individually, but also to connect and form social groups of affinity and support. With approximately 47.3 million users, Myspace.com is a recent and controversial example of a virtual, digital public hang-out for youth where they gossip, share important information about health, family, and personal issues, and exchange photos, music, and other media.

• Urban computing: This set of technologies includes ubiquitous wireless connectivity, portable communications devices, global information systems, and location based applications that embed information into places and objects in meaningful ways. Urban computing makes the physical environment a game board or an enriched learning milieu. New practices for “tagging”, or annotating, the physical world will grow, creating first person views of places – so neighborhoods, malls, and public spaces can become learning environments.

• Serious Games: World building and role playing games like the Sims, World of Warcraft or location-based cell phone games (The GoGame) are new forms of digital play that rely on cooperative team work, critical thinking, and problem solving for success. They represent a new mode of pedagogy that has the potential to reach learners in context specific, immersive settings.

Media Savvy youth will drive new practices in emerging pervasive learning environments, such as tagging their neighborhoods, schools, and bringing their digital literacy and gaming skills to their everyday lives. Already 87% of teens go online and 57% share text and personal creations online. As generation Y and Z become parents and teachers, they will be more likely to expect and contribute to the growth of media-rich pervasive learning environments.
Public places become personal spaces
This decade will become the decade of information in place— geocoded data will be linked through the Internet and accessible through a variety of mobile tools from cell phones and PDAs to augmented-reality devices (like eyeglasses). The result will be an increasingly first-person view of places, where rich streams of personalized media “redraw” streets, storefronts, schools, and community locations. Educational content and curriculum will become context-specific, aligning personal learning needs with places.


Learning gets physical
Digital–physical fusion enables the community to truly become the classroom. Learning has always had a physical and emotional component that has been minimized as computers isolate students from each other, teachers, and the real world. Now technology enables mediated immersive learning. Students learn while moving through real environments with the mobile technology—so their cognitive apprenticeship involves not only their brains, but also their bodies in informal learning environments.