About

A quick explainer on what this site is about. This page was intended to explain to both the casual reader as well as students or staff involved in the research what smart learning was in the context of the doctoral project.


This site is about informal and formal smart learning. Smart learning uses mobile location based apps for access to subject content and some discussion threads to learn about places and people while out and about in the real world.

It’s for learners, including information related to learning journeys, like subject expert content or social media content.

It’s also for learning practitioners, with a number of guides and tutorials on how to create learning journeys, what kinds of free apps are available and other useful information.

Learning journeys are situated in a variety of places both around the Maltese islands and in central London, UK.

Through this site learners can also submit mobile feedback reports with their own content and comments that will also tell us their GPS location. The idea is to develop maps of learner reports to associate with real world places. All personal info is removed and not shown in the maps 🙂

What is smart learning?

For the proposes of this project, smart learning (originally known as smart city learning) is any learning that uses networks, GPS and often augmented reality (though not always). Learners use their smartphones to look at features of real life places, for example signs, plaques, paintings, doorways, and using apps like Aurasma can access digital content in webpages or videos to learn more about something related to that place. Often, learners create and upload their own content and might share experiences to social media in some cases.

Posts and pages on this sites

The posts and pages available on this site to general visitors are either explanatory or tutorials used to teach undergraduate and post graduate students about smart learning. Many other posts are on the site that are only accessible via a smart learning journey. If you take part in a journey you’ll see a short statement at the bottom of these pages, stating ‘Geofenced smart learning, AR doctoral research, UoM, 2017-20, P Lister’ in the post footer. Though you can save, share and reopen these links, they are not available via searching or browsing categories on this website.