Learning Media

Objective	Research the innovative power of new media, new mobile devices and ICTs for more intensive learning experiences
Target users	Innovators in Education, Training and Human Resource Management
Programme leader	Dr. Wim Westera
Programme plan	Learning Media Programme Design, development, and use of networked learning media

The goal of the Learning Media Programme is to establish innovative, challenging and pervasive ways of learning and teaching that exploit the opportunities of emerging digital media, media technologies and devices, which include wide band internet and mobile network technologies as well as user-generated content and a variety of new portable communication devices.

The three central themes of the Learning Media programme are:

1. Immersive media (theme leader: dr. Hans Hummel)
   This theme covers challenging, immersive and greatly involving environments, which mimic and mostly simplify real world complexity for learning purposes, or create absorbing non-existing realities for this. Immersion Media include virtual laboratories, virtual practicals, computational simulations, serious games and virtual worlds. They offer learners a safe and dedicated space for exploration, experimentation and practicing and they are known to be highly motivating and challenging because they place the learners in control, offer substantial freedom of movement and provide a lot of natural feedback. 
    
2. Mobile media (theme leader: prof. dr. Marcus Specht)
   Handheld and mobile devices are a fast-growing market. Also, the devices combine various separate multimedia and networking functions: i.e. telephone, photo and video recording, playing music, PDA-services, uploading blogs, mobile tracking services. They open up a mixed reality by defining new representations of the world that extend the real life arena. Hence, physical reality and virtual life are getting more and more intertwined. Mobile media for learning cover two fields of application: 1) the ubiquitous and cross media access to learning resources on the one hand, and 2) the contextualisation and personalisation of learning media on the other hand using context parameters as location, time, task, environment, or user information to adapt media for best learning support of the individual. Mobile media strongly support the intertwining of learning with daily life and work, and thus enable new opportunities for non-formal and informal learning, e.g. workplace learning.
    
3. Social media (theme leader: dr. Wim Westera)
   This theme covers emerging modes of user-generated content, content sharing and content tagging according to Web-2.0 approaches. The abundant emergence of (free) web services allows users to combine various tools and resources into rich and personalised working and learning environments. So these new technologies enable learners to aggregate, monitor and combine information streams from various sources and use these for new ways of learning and reflection. This so-called web syndication and the associated mechanisms for tagging and annotation of digital content create new opportunities for expression of thoughts, communication and content handling and thus it procures radical changes in the ways individuals learn.