Experiential Learning

It is a long held notion within the learning sciences that children construct their own understandings of the world through experience (Dewey, 1916; Papert, 1980 ; Tanner, 1997). The core premise of this perspective on learning is epitomised in DeweyÕs notion of Ôeducation through experienceÕ (Dewey, 1938; Rosenbaum et al., 2007). This was the basis for the early development of participatory simulations such as ColellaÕs Virus Game (Colella, 2000; Colella, 2002), and more recent work has also cited the influence of Dewey (for example, Facer et al., 2004).

Dewey (1938) describes a theory of learning that emphasises Ôlearning by doingÕ. Central to this theory is the inherent value of action by participants in a learning activity. From this learning by doing perspective, learning is viewed as a process of knowledge creation through transformative experience, with optimal learning

occurring when learners are able to link new concepts they are learning about with past experience (Kolb, 1984). Experiential learning also emphasises the use of tangible learning concepts that learners encounter and are directly engaged with (Kolb, 1984), rather than abstracted knowledge.

As noted by Piementel (1999), the early work of Piaget and other prominent learning researchers demonstrated that effective learning requires an environment where learners can have appropriate experiences. Experiential learning further emphasises the role that these environments and experiences can have on the learning process. In experiential learning the learner directly encounters the phenomena being studied rather than just thinking about them or studying the experiences of others. This means that learners are able to ground their understandings and new discoveries within their own previous, concrete experiences and can therefore actively construct ideas and relationships (Barab et al., 2002).

Experiential learning has been embraced by mobile learning researchers from one of two perspectives. Firstly, experiential learning fits well with the kinds of activities and environments that mobile and wearable learning technologies, especially context- or location-aware technologies, can offer. A second, complementary perspective is that technological intervention may actually help solve some of the problems seen as inherent to the experiential learning approach. These two perspectives are expanded on below.

2.4.3.2.1 Using mobile technologies to enable experiential learning

Early work seeking to employ experiential, constructivist approaches made use of the computers available at the time, in the form of ÔmicroworldsÕ that could be created through the programming of graphical representations and systems (Papert, 1980). These microworlds were originally conceived to provide children with a kind of computational ÔsandboxÕ; a virtual world in which they could manipulate virtual

objects and observe their interactions. Microworlds have been hailed as flexible tools for enabling powerful insights through the construction of precise experiences (diSessa, 1986), and they have been used to teach children about the concepts and relationships involved in a wide range of topics, from geometry and mathematics to interactive eco-system simulations. The power of these microworlds comes from their capacity to provide children with a context in which to explore discrete space as real and not as abstraction away from their normal everyday experience of physical reality (Pufall, 1988).

Recent work has seized upon the opportunities offered by mobile technologies to enable these sandbox contexts not through virtual worlds on the screen but in real physical spaces that can be explored by learners using mobile and wearable devices. ColellaÕs seminal work on participatory simulations using wearable, networked tags drew on DeweyÕs original principles of experiential learning to develop a learning activity that allowed learners to experience directly a simulation of a physical system, creating a direct link between learnersÕ personal experiences in physical space with the underlying rules that governed the underlying simulation (Colella, 1998; Colella et

al., 1998; Colella, 2000).

This work has since inspired a number of projects seeking to exploit the capacity of mobile devices to provide a way of linking physical experience with the behaviour of an informatic system. Environmental Detectives (Squire and Klopfer, 2007), Savannah (Facer et al., 2004), Mad City Mystery (Squire and Jan, 2007), and Frequency 1550 (Huizenga et al., 2009) have all drawn on ColellaÕs original work, and in many cases have themselves cited Dewey and related work in the development of their mobile learning activities.

2.4.3.2.2 Using mobile technologies to address the problems of experiential learning

Aside from the apparently innate capacity for mobile technologies to enable experiential learning, there is also a complementary perspective that holds that technological intervention may actually help solve some of the problems seen as inherent to the experiential learning approach. At its heart, experiential learning requires that a learner be engaged in a process of self-motivated activity within a learning environment. Engaging learners is relatively easy, but the requirement for self-motivated and self-directed activity has given rise to some criticism of the concept of experiential learning, with some researchers (for example McCullan and Cahoon, 1979; Miettinen, 2000) pointing to the difficulties in achieving such self- motivation in learners and suggesting that a core problem of experiential learning environments is often the distinct lack of a mechanism to focus the learnerÕs awareness. Another suggested problem is that learners may spend too little time reflecting on their experience (Vince, 1998).

A recent example of a project that employs mobile technology to enhance an experiential learning activity can be found in Lai et al. (2007), who describe a mobile system intended to support field-based activities such as taking photographs and recording notes, through the use of prompts via a mobile computer to support a script- based activity. Evaluation indicated that the use of the mobile device led to enhanced performance and supported the experiential nature of the task. Other projects such as MyArtSpace (Vavoula et al., 2009) have demonstrated the effectiveness of mobile technologies in providing structured experiential learning activities away from the classroom.