ABOUT ME
Hi! I am Siobhán McPhee
I am an Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. I am motivated by exploring new means to make teaching, learning and training more engaging and relevant. I felt ignored and uninspired in school and university, and so I approach my teaching in the manner I wish I had been taught! Technology and its use in teaching and training fascinates me in its ability to really engage students and take the focus off the educator or trainer.
WHY MY INTEREST IN PERSUASIVE TECHNOLOGIES and USING AR & AI TOOLS
In the next section I focus on defining persuasive technologies and specifically how they can used in teaching and training. I am a Educational Venture Analyst with multiple years of experience mainly in higher education but also some experience in high school teaching and private sector teaching. The basis of any analysis of a learning technology tool should be how successful it is in engaging the student or the user. This is the reason for my interest in the idea of persuasive technologies in teaching and training, moving persuasion out of the realm of simply being about social media. Persuasion is the objective and the means or delivery of the experiences is through the use of AR & AI tools. I maintain that the combination of AR & AI tools as a means of persuasion is an important investment area in the present moment as the field is expanding rapidly. Though the web transformed how information is collected, transmitted, accessed and used in learning and training, it requires people to mentally translate 2-D information for use in a 3-D world. The web is therefore still not immersive in how learning and training are delivered. The use of AR technology combined with AI, enables the superimposing of digital information directly on real objects or environments. Learners/users can therefore process the physical and digital simultaneously, eliminating the need to mentally bridge the two.
