Locative Learning Project in Banff, Canada

Our plan

The Locative Learning project (LLp) provided grade sevens at Banff Community High School with a unique opportunity to learn about local history and explore special places of historic interest within their community. Using new media tools including mobile phones, GPS, and multimedia creation software, about 60 Social Studies students at BCHS researched and created their very own GPS walking tour of downtown Banff (dubbed the "Banff Mobile History Tour"). Over the '07/'08 school year, the students worked in groups to research a topic from Banff's colourful history. They then chose a real world GPS location or "hotspot" in which to tell their story, wrote a script, and recorded an audio presentation. Historical images gathered from the local archives added a visual dimension as well. The way it works is that tour participants walk around downtown Banff with a cellphone, a GPS receiver, and a map. When they step into a hotspot, the phone automatically plays a student-created story. The content of the walking tour is also available online at www.banffmobilehistory.ca. The LLp was a collaboration between the Banff Community High School, Learning Through the Arts, and the Banff New Media Institute's ART Mobile Lab. In 2006, the ART Mobile Lab ran a workshop about the educational potential of locative media as part of an LTTA teachers’s conference held at the Banff Centre. A number of teachers from BCHS attended and a three-way partnership was soon born. In particular, the local grade seven Social Studies teacher was excited about locative media as a new way for students to tell stories about historical people and events within the community. The LTTA was already delivering curriculum-based media arts learning programs in Canadian schools, and the project partners decided that adding a locative element to this programming had some interesting potential in terms of promoting more active learning, new forms of media literacy, and stronger connections between students and their community.

What we did

Once the grant application was written and funding was secured from the Inukshuk Wireless fund, a series of lesson plans was devised. The plan outlined a six-month project with approximately four visits to the classroom per month by LTTA and Mobile Lab learning facilitators. Mobile Lab staff developed a series of active lessons and live demonstrations introducing the principles of locative media and technologies, while the LTTA adapted their existing media arts program for the new locative approach. A local filmmaker was hired to facilitate activities building student skills in multimedia creation. The Social 7 teacher's full participation and leadership was essential, and further partnerships with the Language Arts and Computer Studies teachers turned out to be very important to the project's success. Once the student media-making phase was complete and the walking tour was running, an online mapping website was created so that students could upload their media presentations, allowing community members and Banff visitors to take the tour virtually.