Abstract
Mobile electronic devices (MED) with integrated GPS receivers are increasingly popular in environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD). This paper aims at identifying the possible applications of these devices, as well as identifying obstacles to such utilities. Therefore, a two-part study was conducted: An expert Delphi study and a nationwide online survey in Germany and Austria. In this paper, the results of the online survey are reported and compared to the findings of the Delphi study. The questionnaire of the online survey was based on a theoretical framework comprising different dimensions for the use of MED. Overall, 120 projects were included in the study. The most common target groups were school classes and the devices most frequently used were GPS receivers. The projects addressed the criteria of ESD, such as elaboration of local/global perspectives of sustainability and competencies of EE like pro-environmental behavior or attitudes. All projects were classified according to their educational design in a 2 × 2-scheme. The most common activities were predefined routes within a narrow instructional setting. Divergences between expert views and practical realization are identified and discussed.
Highlights
Connecting learners with nature and sustainability issues is an essential target of environmental education (EE) and of education for sustainable development (ESD)
The potential of mobile devices in environmental education/ESD are manifold and well-designed engaging educational activities can be offered to different target groups
Even though the central target group is reported to be school-aged children in formal educational settings, the distribution of different age-groups indicates a widely accepted implementation of mobile devices in many fields of environmental education and education for sustainable development—families, individual visitors of landscapes or nature conservation centers and members of clubs are addressed to the same extent in their leisure time
Summary
Connecting learners with nature and sustainability issues is an essential target of environmental education (EE) and of education for sustainable development (ESD). Mobile electronic devices (MED) like cell phones, smartphones, PDAs or tablet PCs, as well as handheld GPS navigation devices could facilitate access to remote or interesting locations (cf [5]) and increase interaction with the natural environment. The direct natural environment of a learner provides a specific context and mobile technologies offer additional digital artefacts to enrich the learning experience in situ (e.g., historical artefacts like images of a landscape two hundred years ago or just in another season, artefacts about non-accessible or non-experiential information like a digital simulation of interactions in an ecosystem at different micro-/macroscopic levels, social artefacts like videos of a peat cutter to prelude a sustainability-related dilemma discussion or just intuitive tools for scientific analysis and data collection) [8]
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