Pedagogical Landscapes Platform: a virtual territory to learn

Abstract

The goal of this contribution is to expose the design and implementation of a digital platform called Pedagogic Landscapes Platform (PLAPP because of Spanish acronym), online at http://www.plapp.edu.uy, directed to children in school-age and built from remote sensing and visualizing technological gadgets. This platform exposes the results of a research about local landscape perception among children from a school located in the East of Uruguay. Digital photography, drone flights and participative cartography were applied as innovative tools in order to foster landscape comprehension from different scales and approaches.

The interdisciplinary team, composed by architects, anthropologists, landscape designers and professors worked together with school teachers and children from a rural school as a pilot experience. Research developed over a 12-month period. Obtained results were adapted to a communication and content format specifically tailored to school population. We developed a digital platform that exhibited several viewpoints with 360-degree vision capabilities, incorporating also sensible points that deployed additional information about the place and/ or topic.  Each viewing station has a help menu in order to facilitate navigation across the available options, including orbiting from a viewpoint, displacement to another location, image zooming and capture from a contextual menu. Deployable cards containing information related to native plant trees and birds (related to the local street nomenclator) were generated by the research team and integrated into the platform, together with drawings, texts and audios generated by the children. In addition, a time lapse study was developed, based on aerial photographs provided by the local Geographical Service from 1943, 1966, 1985 and current satellite imagery, which allowed the team to develop the morphing technic by the implementation of an historical path that promote the identification of landscape transformation through time.

The unmanned aerial vehicle technology allowed the capture of high-quality video and still images (4K 3840 x 2160 pixels) in locations inaccessible from the ground. Aerial views covered a vast portion of the territory and allowed the generation of comprehensive panoramas, overviews, landscape markers and control points. The aerial photograph survey was conducted by circular trajectories at different fly heights and static panorama captures with varying viewing angles. Another development included the merging of such panoramas to generate a semi-spherical image which can be accessed and interactively navigated from a web browser. Such interactive image is the result of merging together 27 flat images. In addition, a version for touch sensitive devices was also developed.

The methodological approach is linked with the Learning Analytics concept by evaluating the impact of new technologies introduction to learning capabilities. It seeks to analyze data recovered from the activities proposed by the project in order to define and identify any problems or unforeseen issue that could prevent the adoption of such new learning technologies. Content and speech analysis were included in the Project, allowing the identification of meaningful data about the interaction between children and new technologies related language expressions. Among developed activities, virtual landscape cartography emerged as a key element.

The vast array of learning possibilities promoted by this virtual environment is strongly related with current ways of knowledge and information exchange in which the world is perceived as a complex network of interactions. A XXIth Century child who navigates through the Google Earth engine holds a visual perception of earth landscapes that is dramatically different from the perception of children from last decades and centuries. The general idea of the landscape as a cultural construction is accompanied by a pleasant sensation in viewing a territory. We are experiencing an era of abrupt and rapid changes in the way we perceive this intricate network of relationships and links that characterize the digital era. In this context, the search for new ways of teaching and learning from tools such as virtual territories emerge as a needful and promising field of research.