Landscape and literacy on Aboriginal country

In 2015, we embarked on a mobile learning project that was designed to introduce undergraduate students in media and communication to Aboriginal cultural and heritage sites in the city of Melbourne. The project encouraged learners to explore their surrounding 'cultural landscape' and their histories, including the built and natural environments, art installations and popular space. Students used their mobiles to navigate to selected geocache locations (www.geocaching.com) as a way to encourage reflection on Aboriginal place, politics, culture and heritage. The project sought to engage non-Indigenous students on Indigenous issues in participatory ways, often for the first time in their studies. Students were provided with opportunities in class to conduct research on Indigenous issues and sites, and then to develop textual descriptions of sites with accompanying digital content. Students were provided with assessment instructions on what was expected of them with clear learning outcomes. A key outcome was to develop a model of participatory engagement with Aboriginal communities, and to involve Aboriginal members of the community in providing feedback to students on the textual and digital content they produced. Some of this content was selected and used to develop a walking tour phone app of key Indigenous sites of historical significance (www.mytoursapp.com). This app will eventually go live and be given to Aboriginal partners, allowing them to control and manage its look and feel, and how it is used and shared. Initial findings from these projects suggest that: 'place' is a multi-faceted concept, which mobile technologies can explore to greater effect; and app development provides an opportunity for sometimes disengaged community and student-participants to become key contributors to the M-Learning process and subsequent curation/caretaking. Our panel presentation will focus on discussing key learnings along with outcomes and findings from this project.