Education in the Digital Age: A Driving Force or a Lost Place

2.1 The World Wide Web

It does not need much of an analysis to identify the potential and effect of the internet through the last twenty years. Especially one basic internet service, the World Wide Web, did evolve from a scientific to a general use system and partially even to a replacement for classical paper and other analog media repositories and archives. The first website was been launched in 1991 and since then we have a linear development with about 5 % increase of internet users per year worldwide during the last 15 years [35].

The WWW, combined with certain content generators, let it be office software, standard document file formats like PDF, or markup languages like HTML and web browsers, has replaced most of the paper for daily informational use. The rate of 5 % per year in the increase of internet users is roughly about the same linear rate of the reduction of paper for graphical (i. e. informational) use, like for print, press, and office in Germany over the last 15 years [6].

To generalize and forecast, it can be expected that WWW-like internet sources and archives will practically fully replace individual and institutional archives within the next two decades. This can be expected to have a strong, and not only positive impact on the educational system, since the informational sources for knowledge construction will not be well researched textbooks from the bookshelf or well groomed public archives, but more or less open internet archives and proprietary search engines.

2.2 A Spectrum of Digital Devices

What happened in the last 20 years in the development of computing devices for educational use? It can easily be recognized that the technologies for such devices did not only make large progress in performance, but also in their availability in companies, the public sector, and, above all, for personal use. What happened in the same timeframe in schools? These institutions followed mainly the old track of PC rooms, or at best, classroom packs of notebooks or tablets, which are more or less remnants of the early days of personal computing shortly after the advent of the PC. Till today, many schools do not allow the use of personal devices like smartphones or tablets owned by the students in the classroom or even in the school building. Why not? The discussions and justifications given are manifold:

1. access to publicly available content that is not appropriate for children;

2. frequent and time consuming use of communication services and platforms between the students or peers;

3. distractions from teaching;

4. privacy and security problems;

5. insufficient availability of devices for every child.

To reflect this potential for schools, we may follow the current discussion in the COVID-19 pandemic to recognize that the educational system, especially in the area of elementary and secondary schooling, was not able to provide managed and usable digital devices for every student or teacher. Large and slow federal investment programs still try to implement within a few months what has not happened in 20 years. Besides the fact that the devices cannot be delivered in such a short time frame, it is unclear, how these shall be administrated, used and how the replacements and reinvestments after a few years shall be realized.

Following the thoughts of Mark Weiser [37], we today find a large spectrum of computing devices in many sizes and form factors that infiltrated and enriched our daily lives at the same time. Besides generally available PCs, notebooks and smartphones, we meanwhile have these tabs, pads and boards Weiser predicted. Additionally we meanwhile have even smaller and physically even more intrusive devices, like wearables and body implants, and, in the opposite dimension, more embedding larger devices like interactive boards, theaters, or digital domes. The perhaps most profound concept for a spectrum of media used by human beings has been conceptualized by Marshall McLuhan as “Extensions of Man” [31]. Many of the new devices fit quite exactly into the previsions of McLuhan and Weiser; others are filling any conceivable gap between them. This whole spectrum of all these devices has been tried for education [39]; however, we are far from a general availability and integration into the educational systems.

2.3 Ubiquitous Digital Clouds

In today’s school, at least in many “highly developed” countries like Germany, most schools still use no or low bandwidth internet connections for mainly administrational, and to a slowly growing extent, for teaching applications in the classroom. Schools started with digital phonelines and reached today rarely more than coppercable-based low bandwidth networks, often not better than those of a single private household.

One of the main action points in the current COVID-19 pandemic was the commitment, however with far too little funding, to install WiFi networks, tablets and digital interactive white and blackboards in the schools. This sounds like fulfilling a long desire, but why should we ask for WiFi, tablets and digital boards? It is like asking for dishes when people are hungry. The real challenge is to connect available school and private digital devices to content-oriented network services, something called Cloud Computing. But what does that mean for education?

Cloud Computing has a network aspect that usually deals with the provision of internet services for directory and file management together with some collaboration functions. This is basically useful for computing in the old sense working with documents and hierarchical archival structures.

3.1 The Role of the World Wide Web for Education

If we analyze the use of the WWW in schooling and education we can see two main developments influencing the educational sector.

First, we can see the informal use of the WWW for the distribution of information. We have a huge number of smaller and larger information services that can be used as sources for education. The smaller ones are often specific sources on nearly any topic stemming from private or professional websites. The larger ones are open social platforms like Wikipedia, which is besides the Google Search Engine and YouTube one of the most intensely used information services for students [30]. All of these informal sources have the property that their content quality is more or less arbitrary and sometimes even cannot be judged because of their dynamic nature and often anonymous origin. However, these sources are used daily on a broad scale by nearly everybody for any kind of problem solving, homework, or just for curiosity. These informal sources are meanwhile used in about the same way as formerly published books, journals, or archives.

Second, there are official pedagogically developed sources provided by educational, research or other professional institutions. These educational sources are more or less publicly accessible. The dream in the early years of the internet that qualified educational content will be widely and freely distributed did not happen yet. The basic ideas of e-learning through web-based training modules works to some extent within well defined educational ecosystems, like commercialized online colleges or universities. For elementary and even secondary education there are practically no pedagogically trustable or relevant web-based sources, except some more or less ad-hoc exchange and forum platforms for teachers with low content and outreach [11].

That does not mean that there is no use of the internet and the WWW when searching for information. This is meanwhile done by search engines, mainly Google with currently about 2 trillion requests per day worldwide. These search requests are increasingly leading to documents or websites in the informal or commercial part of the internet as discussed above.

As a summary one can state that digital learning takes place on a large collection of digital islands without much structure, outreach, or positive impact for the educational systems worldwide. Official education in schools and universities takes place in a way quite similar way as it has been 25 years ago when there was no WWW. On the other side, anybody, school students and teacher included, are unofficially using internet search engines and repositories with no trustable content and quality for their work and research.

3.2 Digital Devices for Education

What are the digital devices used in the educational area? This question leads to two major directions.

First, we can look into schools or higher education institutions. We will find PC rooms, notebook carts to flexibly provide sets of mobile computers to classrooms and the like. The classrooms themselves are still in the state of the blackboard; however, many have been upgraded to digital whiteboards, beamer projections and large TV sets, but the main setting is the same like 20 years ago. We have the teacher at the board, the students at their desks and some variations of this, like grouped desks at best. The students will use their books, pens and exercise sheets, more recently sometimes replaced by tablets and some undefined and stand-alone applications running on them.

The second look on the digital devices usable for learning starts with something quite different, the smartphone. Children typically starting in the age of 10 or 12 with their own smartphone and use these devices for “nearly everything” with about 96 % regular daily use [30]. They are communicating, searching, reading, and playing with them. In some cases they got tablets for the same purpose, mostly at home. However, this story of mobiles in the potential sense of flexible knowledge tools ends abruptly at the school gates. Most schools do not allow using these powerful general purpose devices inside school and switch to the classical analog devices or to the sparsely equipped official “equivalents”. However, at least higher educational institutions gave up with the provision of institutional computers and provide rooms with empty work desks instead, in some cases with sockets for power adapters to support the use of personal digital devices.

3.3 Digital Networks for Education

Quite symmetrically to the devices available, we can find two similar approaches for digital networks.

First, most educational institutions now try to provide WiFi networks for their students. This works quite well in higher educational systems, but still not very successful in most schools. Low budget federal programs are intended to install WiFi networks in all schools. Some programs started 10 years ago and many seem to need another 10 years to “complete”, before they will notice that they have to decommission them every 3–5 years and invest for follow up systems.

Second, the students meanwhile use high volume or flat rate mobile networks on their own devices. 4G and 5G networks are performing quite as well or even better than school networks, if any are available. Nevertheless, a switched off mobile device in school will not be networking in any way. It will just be a dead object and a dead investment for a substantial duration during the days in school.

We have already been talking about Cloud Computing. What does that mean to education so far? There is one concept that has is going to serve as a main platform for the educational sector. These are the so-called Learning Management Systems (LMS) that are currently brought into schools and some years earlier to universities. LMS have been invented about 20 years ago. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic they found their way into schools on a broader basis, and about 10 years earlier already into universities. We might say that these LMS are now state of the art and have been the first digital game changer in the educational system. But what are they good for? They give access to educational information like documents, exercises, tests and even hooks for communication systems like chat or video conferencing. LMS reflect the organization of the educational institutions and the curricula. These are good and bad news at the same time. It is good to provide digital tools to manage the educational processes, but at the same time LMS are an anachronism by shaping the digital educational system aligned to the old world of schooling. They support to organize and they prevent at the same time from thinking an educational future based on the new potentials of computer systems and networks, like their capability to transfer, transform, and semantically annotate digital media to create dynamic knowledge-based environments [16]. What happens to the teaching and learning content in an LMS? The content is “inside” the documents, at best reflected by some document names, topic structures, or web links. To make it clear: LMS are not made for teaching and learning; they are made for the administration of teaching and learning.

4.1 Development in Education Is Slow

Digital technologies are developing very fast, while digital solutions and their pervasive introduction into the educational system is very slow. This has always been the case with learning technologies and one could argue that it is better to keep a slow and thoughtful process. However, this will lead to solutions that are for several reasons, like the size of the educational system and the education of teachers, always far behind the available technologies. This even goes so far that educational technologies in practical use are commonly anachronisms years behind the world outside school. This leads to functional drawbacks and, more seriously, to acceptance problems for the school as a major constituent of our knowledge culture. Students, and meanwhile many of their parents too, have legitimate doubt about the relevance of their educational institutions, including the teachers working with outdated or misplaced technologies that do not reflect the current or later real lives (“Lebenswirklichkeit”) of the students.

4.2 Education Is Not Digital-Ready

Today’s pedagogy is not “digital-ready”. This means it has not been adapted to the major technological changes that happened in the rest of the daily lives [15], [17]. There is nothing wrong about books and there is nothing wrong about digital books, but they can only play their proven role. As McLuhan pointed out, new media will always embed old media and that it is a reasonable approach to intentionally embed old media into new media. Therefore it makes sense to go on with writing textbooks as downloadable sources, but this is just the beginning and a kind of low-level transition. It is not the potential nature of digital technologies in education. Even the transformation of a book into a website within a distance learning environment is just the beginning and not the end of the transformations needed and wanted. What we need is to design Semantic or Knowledge Media [8], [16] that

1. include and embed old well proven analog content,

2. pervasively interlink content with other content (the idea of the web),

3. markup media with semantic annotations and higher concepts (the idea of the semantic web),

4. use these semantic structures for automatic, but explainable reasoning (human-centered AI [18]),

5. connect with the real world outside school (mixed realities [34], [19] and contextualized learning [10], [21], [23]).

4.3 Constructivist and Cultural Education

Learners need to be able to creatively construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct knowledge media. Digital media and information systems bring us closer to the idea of constructivist and individual learning than any technology before. Cole and Engeström outline in respect to knowledge construction [3]: “When moving toward the mastery of any academic subject, schoolchildren, with the teacher’s help, analyze the content of the curricular material and identify the primary general relationship in it, at the same time making the discovery that this relationship is manifest in many other particular relationships found in the given material.”.

To follow the individual constructivist approach does not mean that there is no social or cultural learning. Digital technologies enable people to set up social and cultural frameworks and platforms for the negotiation and documentation of their common ground. The challenge that arises in the area of cultural learning is authenticity, and not truth. It will always be difficult to track down the sources of information and belief. As the socio-digital processes are so fast, sometimes even called viral, it may be difficult and even grueling to decide, what shall be the common ground for education. Even if there would be a stronger bias to scientific foundations, it will be hindered by the complexity through many contributions, systemic structures, and discourses. The current discussion about how to manage a pandemic and related social behavior is an impressive example for the end of the old science and perhaps the forced beginning of a new way to manage educationally and even politically scientific contributions, insights, and consequences.

The challenge therefore will not only be to teach the concepts of science, but the genesis of knowledge in social, political, and cultural processes. These processes are based on the natural activities of the individual in a social role and setting [4]. Children need to be taught to become serious and purposeful producers in a social discourse, instead of being just the consumers of predefined technical and informational constructions [33]. Digital media have the potential for this next step in schooling to critically reflect and communicate so-called facts, knowledge, and cultural heritage [46], [47]. This turn from constructivism to post-constructivism or “New Realism” – in a positive sense – can be a key for the role of digital media in education. Knowledge media can provide “handles” into the mental and practical creation processes, how knowledge is formed, derived, changed, connected, and used. It is able to relate or translate objects of discourse to facts, facts to concepts, and concepts to culture. This reflects the genesis of knowledge and, if practiced by students, gives a much deeper understanding about the formation and role of knowledge and culture.

5.1 Post-Constructivist Teaching and Learning

Since 2001 we conducted a series of research projects about the conception and introduction of interactive digital media for the education of mainly children and youth. We designed and implemented learning systems and environments that try to incorporate different methods and modes of digital learning into an integrated platform, where media can be created, constructed, connected, and annotated to create knowledge media [8], [16], [22], [25]. I will outline some of these basic concepts:

1. a system of media for constructivist learning

2. learners as creative builders and teachers as their guides

3. ambient, i. e. technologically embedded learning anytime and anyplace

4. a wide spectrum of knowledge tools (applications and devices) fitting the different contexts

5. support for scaffolding knowledge

6. semantic modeling of domains through media

7. situated learning on demand

8. connecting culture and education

5.2 Ambient Learning Spaces (ALS)

The post-constructivist approaches and concepts discussed have been integrated into a research-oriented teaching and learning environment, called Ambient Learning Spaces (ALS), which has meanwhile been developed from an early collection of evaluated stand-alone prototypes into daily used, integrated and networked pilot installations in the field, mainly in schools and museums [48], [49], [24], [26], [23]. ALS is made for teaching and learning with interactive digital media in real world contexts. This means, it is built as a pervasive system with modular frontend applications for different devices connected to a central backend for storage and reuse of semantic multimedia content. The infrastructure supports a variety of teaching and learning contexts as discussed below.

5.2.1 In-School Teaching

In-school teaching is an old, but well cultured form of organized education. Even while more flexible solutions like home schooling will be available through digital media ‒ as poorly practiced in the current COVID-19 pandemic ‒ the school as a space will keep its dominant role as the primary place for teaching, learning, and socializing. Nevertheless, future digital teaching and learning solutions not only have to allow the access in school; they will have to be redesigned for much more open situations and flexible spaces inside modern school buildings.

The classic classroom teaching will still be widely used in future. However, the classroom is a place that needs to be connected to digital content, which can be created, presented, and changed by the teachers and learners inside and outside the classroom. Typical current trends in the classroom are the availability of large digital screens (boards) or digital projectors in the front or at the side walls of the classrooms, depending on the classroom layout. The classroom and its displays need to be connected to central digital backend storage. We implemented these basic concepts as the InteractiveWall [38], [43], [45] and the InteractiveTable.

Learners will need group spaces for project and topical work. These can be smaller rooms, similar to classrooms, or be designed as “work islands” equipped with InteractiveWalls and InteractiveTables additionally to classical teaching equipment for collaborative work. In group spaces, the students shall be able to use their own computer devices such as notebooks, tablets, or smartphones connected to the same digital resources. It is important to make it possible that students use their own digital devices inside and outside school to create a pervasive learning environment in the sense of “Bring your own Device (BYOD”) [21]. Making differences between school and personal equipment or disabling personal devices will create many disruptions in the thinking and acting of the learners, when working on “their” topics and projects.

Figure 1

ALS InteractiveWall: interactions in the social space of a school foyer (Carl-Jacob-Burckhardt-Gymnasium, Lübeck, Germany).

Figure 2

ALS InteractiveStage: artistic performances with media, posture and gesture tracking (Carl-Jacob-Burckhardt-Gymnasium, Lübeck, Germany).

The school foyer is a social area, where students may present their work results and other media before or after school hours or during breaks (Figure 1). They can use several InteractiveWalls and InteractiveTables to work with digital content that has been created during learning. Presenting their work in their “social hours” will make teaching and learning part of the students’ daily social lives. It will bridge between courses and classes and allows presenting proudly, what has been found and constructed. The foyer may also be a place for playing games in social contexts. Not very time-consuming smaller digital games for mathematical, geographical, or artistic challenges can be of use. Other informational applications for the social space may be announcements, daily schedules, or the school canteen menu.

Many schools have theaters with stages for live presentation like stage plays, musicals, or dance performances. While this was formerly done through physical and mechanical stage decorations, we can now use interactive technologies to track the actors, their postures and gestures to create interactive multimedia presentations on stage. A digital stage leads from classical theater or dance performances to programmed interactive multimedia performances. The media presented on stage can be connected to the central multimedia backend system. The stage will become part of the teaching and learning processes themselves (Figure 2) [27].

In some schools, we will find 360° theaters (domes) initially used for astronomical and geographical presentations (Figure 3) [23]. These can be refitted and reused for digital photographic or synthetic 360° presentations. The content can be created by 360° cameras or Virtual Reality (VR) environments. The domes can be used for streaming presentations, like 360° movies, or for interactive presentations, like in VR settings. If schools do not have a dome, meanwhile cheap VR head-mounted-displays (HMDs) can be used instead, however with the drawback that it will not be the same social experience like being physically in “the same room”.

Figure 3

ALS InteractiveDome: an immersive full dome environment in a school (Grund- & Gemeinschaftsschule, St. Jürgen, Lübeck, Germany; image courtesy of Ralph Heinsohn).

5.3 The ALS Architecture and Modules

The basic system architecture of ALS is shown in Figure 4. The Frontend Mobile and Stationary Learning Applications have been decoupled from the backend by web-services. Most of the frontend applications and authoring systems are web-based for maximum flexibility. The backend system NEMO (Network Environment for Multimedia Objects) can be installed and operated at any place inside or outside school, only depending on internet web access and sufficient bandwidth. NEMO implements the basic cloud architecture [9], [29]. The ALS-Portal is a kind of content and configuration management system, giving access to all ALS components for the users. With a suite of Content Creation and Editing Tools, e. g. for image, video, or 3D editing, the users are able to create and edit the media stored in the backend and used in the learning applications.

Figure 4

ALS System Architecture.

5.3.2 ALS NEMO Repository

The central backend storage NEMO is implemented by a Logic, Large Media Storage, and Semantic Database Layer to provide persistent storage of knowledge media. Media created and bound to objects representing the learning discourses are defining a growing semantic web in the learning domain. Several media in different formats adapted for different devices will represent an object of the world and make it perceivable through the media. NEMO enables the learners to reuse media created or collected through one learning application in other learning applications for related but different learning contexts. This is important to create a growing knowledge repository that can be abstracted and enriched through media, annotations, and classifications within a topic or lesson and even longer term over several classes and years.

NEMO can be hosted on any physical or virtual machine in a network to support cloud-based networking. Several NEMO instances may be connected and cascaded to provide content independent of its current location. This can be used to connect schools with other schools or cultural institutions and public archives. NEMO can be viewed as a distributed cloud-based storage system of semantic teaching and learning content to serve any frontend environment while satisfying ownership, digital rights and security needs [1], [9], [29].

Figure 5

ALS TimeLine: modeling chronological correlations (Hanse-Schule für Wirtschaft und Verwaltung, Lübeck, Germany).

5.3.4 ALS Stationary Learning Modules

After having been searching, discussing and collecting in real contexts such as urban space, museum or biotope, the students need to select and order their findings to answer questions or create abstractions of what they found. This again will usually be a social teaching and learning process that will typically happen within schools on bigger devices in a larger group or class context. To visualize the findings they can make use of large screens like an InteractiveWall (IW) [38], [43], [45] (Figure 1) or an InteractiveTable. The IW provides so-called MediaGalleries that show collections from the field or collections of selected, grouped, tagged, and classified media bound to objects of the learning domain. From these, the students can create presentations or documents under supervision and guidance of their teachers or parents at home.

TimeLine is a web application embedded into the IW. It displays a graph structure visualizing knowledge entities with time-related meaning and dependencies [25], [20]. The knowledge entities created and managed are Events. They represent a point or a period of time in the chronological graph. Events can be annotated with a topic by tagging. They can also be associated with any available media like text, image, audio, or video from the cloud-based ALS storage NEMO. In TimeLine users can navigate by touch interaction through the chronological graph and explore knowledge entities and the annotated content (Figure 5). A TimeLine display consists of one or more sub-timelines, i. e. semantic dimensions or categories over the same period of time. For example, political events can be shown in parallel to economical or technological developments. This allows multiple perspectives on history and helps to identify, question and explain causalities and other dependencies. TimeLine events can also be transferred as seeds to SemCor, leading to further semantical explorations of the time structures represented. With TimeLine students experience and understand history as a personal, social, and cultural construction.

SemCor is a learning application for active search and knowledge creation within the IW (Figure 6). It supports interactive exploration of semantic correlations between knowledge entities and allows inspecting interrelated visual representations of information in a semantic web [25]. Students can provide a starting seed and can specify a category (like places, species, people) to explore filtered semantic correlations. SemCor usually connects to a public semantic repository (e. g. DBpedia) to search for related entities. Once related entities are found, they are grouped through the categories and are visualized in a force-directed graph. Entities can be selected to expand the visualized knowledge space. Selecting a knowledge entity, further detailed content (e. g. the corresponding Wikipedia article) is shown and can be explored further. SemCor will deliver automatically and dynamically new knowledge entities in the graph. They are internally searched and selected through some useful predefined search algorithms and filters. SemCor resembles and visualizes the mesh and complexity of world knowledge and motivates explorations through serendipity. The semantic repository SemCor is connected to semantic archives that can be created or chosen from available ones. The base system works with DBpedia and Wikipedia. Other repositories for certain knowledge domains, which provide public interfaces, like the Europeana, can be connected.

Figure 6

ALS SemCor: exploring semantic relationships (Buddenbrookhaus, Heinrich-und-Thomas-Mann-Zentrum. Lübeck, Germany).

5.3.5 ALS Mobile Learning Modules

Authentic education through social activities in real contexts is a post-constructivist approach to build individual knowledge within a cultural setting. To do this, learners have to leave the synthetic and neutral space of school and enter physical cultural contexts like urban spaces, biotopes, industrial environments, or cultural collections and archives like museums and libraries. Through the use of networked mobile applications on smartphones, tablets, or wearables [44], the computing devices ‒ the cultural or knowledge tools according to Vygotsky [36] ‒ can be carried by the learners to keep the scaffold of teaching with them and enable them studying in context by selecting and collecting data and media to be brought back to school. Learners can currently use the two different ALS mobile learning applications InfoGrid and MoLES [21] on their personal mobiles inside and outside the school buildings. To setup projects for MoLES and InfoGrid, teachers and learners can use the web-based ALS-Portal from any place through the Internet. All project- and task-related information entered are saved in the NEMO backend system.

MoLES (Mobile Learning Exploration System) is a task-oriented mobile learning system [10], [40], [41], [42]. Teachers can create new MoLES projects for the learners using the ALS-Portal. When setting up a project, the teacher has to define a title, a description, and an image for the project. Then multiple physical locations can be added, where learners have to solve tasks like mastering challenges in a game. After the definition of the locations, the teacher can set up one or multiple tasks for each created location. Each task can contain a title, a description, and media files. Furthermore, a task can be assigned to a group of learners (Figure 7). The MoLES frontend application is a web-app running in any mobile browser. Learners can access the MoLES webpage and log in using their mobile phones. Afterwards, a list of all available projects is presented to them. After making a selection, all locations available for the project are listed and the learners can choose the starting point for their tour. Arriving at the physical locations learners can solve the tasks by taking notes, photos, or creating time-based media files such as audio and video recordings. All media files will be automatically uploaded into the NEMO repository and will therefore be available later for deeper studies, presentations, or other purposes.

Figure 7

ALS MoLES: mobile task-oriented teaching and learning outside of school (Carl-Jacob-Burckhardt-Gymnasium, Lübeck, Germany).

InfoGrid is an augmented reality app for educational purposes [21], [50]. Teachers or students can create new InfoGrid projects using the ALS-Portal through a web-browser, typically at school or home. When setting up a project, it is mandatory to define a title, a description for the project, and upload a photographic target database. There is an option to add tour-related information as an intro in form of a textual description, a thumbnail, or a video file that will be displayed when starting the tour on the mobile. The intro will be used to welcome the user, introduce the tour, and show where and how to find the targets in physical space. After saving the new project, the ALS-Portal redirects the user to the tour elements definition page. For any defined photographic target in the scene, an AR overlay such as an image, video, or 3D object can be assigned. For the production of 3D objects from image and video footage, a special converter has been developed that can be used by teachers or students themselves. For this purpose photos or videos of physical 3D objects will be taken. A special module of the NEMO media conversion layer, as well as the 3DEdit authoring system, will be used to create these objects [2]. Upon start, the InfoGrid mobile app connects to the NEMO backend and downloads a list of available tours. Once the user selects a tour, InfoGrid downloads the necessary information into the mobile device. Then the user will be offered the intro. When the mobile device is facing one of the prepared targets in the physical space, the app displays and dynamically adjusts the augmentation through the display of the mobile device (Figure 8). In case of audio and video augmentations, the app streams the audio and video data from the connected NEMO repository. A graphical site map supports the users in finding and identifying the targets of the tour.

Figure 8

ALS InfoGrid: mobile discovery-oriented learning through augmented realities (Museum für Natur und Umwelt, Lübeck, Germany).