Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
do at school. The model of “Erfahrraum” combines two ideas into a German name
that reflects the socio-cultural context in which this model emerged. “Erfahrung”
means “experience.” Learning from experience is of course not a new idea: it is
rooted in Dewey's work. Experiential learning is defined by Keeton and Tate (1978)
as learning “in which the learner is directly in touch with the realities being studied”
(p. 2). A dual training system combines this direct experience with some distancia-
tion, more abstract activities in the classroom. Learning technologies are envisioned
as ways to capture the apprentices' experience in order to exploit it during these
more abstract activities in the classroom. “Raum” means room, as we insist on the
physical orchestration of the room (factor 9).
The model has been implemented by different technologies in three different
contexts. In the first context (Gavota, Schneider, Betrancourt, & Richle, 2008), we
capture workplace experience of dental assistants by asking them to write down
their experience in a wiki-like environment. The school activities, peer commenting
and text revision exploit the diversity of experiences across a class of 20 appren-
tices: some work in small cabinets with a single dental surgeon, some in large
cabinets with several surgeons, some with old-fashioned technologies, other with
high-tech cabinets, etc. In the second project, J.-L Gurtner (University of Fribourg)
captures workplace experience life in the context of car mechanics and pastry mak-
ing. They call apprentices on their workplace on the phone and/or ask them to take
pictures. Later on, this raw material feeds classroom activities. Finally, we instan-
tiated the Erfahrraum approach in the context of logistics (Jermann, Zufferey, &
Dillenbourg, 2008). Our observations of logistics apprentices in their warehouse
revealed a gap between what apprentices are asked to do in their warehouse and
what they are supposed to learn. While the official curriculum specifies that they
should acquire logistics skills, the apprentices mainly follow their boss' instructions
(e.g. “move this boy over there”). They are rarely involved in decision making such
as flow optimization, warehouse layout or storage management. We refer to this as
the “abstraction gap,” i.e. the difference in the degree of abstraction between the
tasks they experience and the tasks they should master. In school, the apprentices
encounter more abstract logistics problems but the drawback is that they do not
connect these tasks to their warehouse experience.
The TinkerLamp Environment
The TinkerLamp is an augmented reality system designed to run tabletop tangible
simulations. The simulation which we developed in close collaboration with teach-
ers from a professional school allows logistics apprentices to build a warehouse
model by placing small-scale shelves on the table. Besides shelves, users can place
tangibles which represent architectural constraints (e.g. pillars to sustain the roof of
the warehouse, loading docks, offices and technical service rooms). The building
elements for the model are scaled to allow the construction of a realistic warehouse
(32 by 24 m in reality).
