NECC 2009: SIGML Forum (We Found Kilroy!)

We held our SIGML Forum (NECC 2009) at the World War II Memorial in Washington DC this afternoon. The weather helped us out as a thunderstorm moved through BEFORE we started. Using a set of QR codes we had created to provide about 25 participants with digital content related to various parts of the memorial, we asked them to do the following:

The U.S. National World War II Memorial is a National Memorial dedicated to Americans who served in the armed forces and as civilians during World War II. While many people agree that this is an important monument, critics have argued that

• •its location breaks up the view between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial;
• •the monument takes up space historically used for demonstrations; and
• •that its architecture resembles the architecture of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

Your task is to come up with a compelling argument that demonstrates the importance of the World War II Memorial today.

Use your mobile phones to access supplementary digital content, using the QR codes in this booklet. In addition, you may use your mobile phone to collect evidence in and around the memorial. We will leave it up to you as to how you want to do that.

Participants noted that the experience they had at the memorial was very different from just walking through it. They tended to spend more time at different parts of the monument, and I think they got a better understanding of its importance and its meaning, judging from the discussion we had afterwards. I also noticed that during the debrief nobody talked about what didn’t work (and we did run into some glitches during the event), but all feedback focused on the learning that had taken place. Some other comments that were made included the importance of becoming more literate and fluent in the use of audio and video (not just text), and that the event showed some real possibilities of mobile learning.

We shot a bunch of video and took pictures, and will create a short video of the event in the next couple of days. We’ve posted the QR codes online. More on this to follow shortly.

Oh yes, and we did find Kilroy

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