Ambient Learning Displays: lecture series and results from a participatory design study

Emerging from pervasive and mobile technologies, ambient displays present information and media in the periphery of the user. Thereby the displays situated and interacting in the close proximity are an addition to existing personal interfaces in the foreground, while the user attention can always move from one to the other and back. Especially the ability to deliver contextualised and personalised information in authentic situations fosters ambient displays as an instrument for learning. However the actual design of ambient displays for learning proves to be difficult, as the technical implementations as well as the underlying instructional principles are still immature. The paper presents the main constituents of a lecture series on the use of ambient displays for learning and a first participatory design study conducted during two consecutive lecture sessions. The results show a variety of usable ambient display types, possible learning scenarios, and specific design proposals towards ambient learning displays