Since 2001 I have focused my work on the question of how learning – in the post-digital age in our transcultural society – can be best supported. My multidisciplinary education as a philosopher, educator, artist, designer, etc. benefits me.
As a scientist and project manager at IMIS, I developed digitally enriched learning environments over the course of 20 years. We called them Ambient Learning Spaces (ALS). The development took place in co-design processes with the participation of children, adolescents, students, and colleagues at the university as well as teachers at school and extracurricular institutions.
Systemic-constructivist pedagogical approaches shape the development of cloud-based, body, and space-related media.
Central to this is a shell model developed by me. In our daily life, we are already living in synergy with media. We wear media on our body or carry it with us, but we have media also on-site as tangible media or as media that track us. The cloud-based software that makes up digital media is increasingly shaping our relationship with the world.
Our world today is interwoven with digital media. When we as social beings communicate with each other in the media, this is already supported by artificial intelligence. The construction of learning environments must take this into account.
Onion skin model: The digital media used in an Ambient Learning Space are characterized by a solid reference to the physical space and the learners’ bodies. The location-based media (peripheral and tangible media) enrich the space that surrounds the learners; mobile media (media carried along and media worn on the body) expand the learner’s body. Since all ALS applications access a semantic database—which can also be linked to other semantic databases, such as DBpedia—they are designed for cross-device interaction (XD). This enables, for instance, the identification of the learner within a physical space, thereby allowing for the personalization of media content. This particularly supports group work and cooperative learning.
Video of an interview (in German language) on my research and realization of digitally enriched learning environments at IMIS as part of the 29th GMK Forum on Communication Culture, 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2k9mmqWgmU
Primary school children program behavior while communicating with each other using Tangicons, small mini computers equipped with touchscreens, which, among other things, recognize their relative position in physical space.
Students at a secondary school in front of several multitouch screens of the InteractiveWall (IW).