To be or not to be in situ outdoors, and other implications for design and implementation, in geolocated mobile learning

Fostering contextual learning in situ outdoors is one of the main opportunities favored by mobile computing. Of particular interest is the application of the Global Positioning Service (GPS) to geolocate educational resources. However, geolocating resources is not enough to support learning activities where students explore and interact with the outdoors physical environment practicing in situ related knowledge and skills. This paper studies the factors that have to be considered when designing, virtually or in situ, this type of mobile learning scenarios. Two experiments illustrate and analyze these factors. The results lead to a set of implications–in design, enactment and monitoring–for the development of mobile learning systems.