Near Field Communication - Which Potentials Does NFC Bring for Teaching and Learning Materials?

Abstract

Near Field Communication (NFC) is deemed to be a future technology with a lot of potential in many areas. One of those areas, learning and teaching, will be covered in this article, showing possible usages of NFC with teaching and learning materials. With a lot of new NFC capable devices presented recently, this technology can be utilized in many areas, including the arbitrarily growing field of mobile learning. Mobile devices, especially smartphones, can help to close the gap between printed media and online media. Several methods, e.g. two-dimensional barcodes, have already been used to connect the digital world with printed media but almost all of them caused inconveniences or difficulties. NFC presents an easy to use way to share and communicate directly between capable devices or tags that can be applied almost anywhere. In this publication a first insight to the potential of NFC for teaching and learning content is given. A prototype is programmed to allow data transformation between the print media and the smartphone. It can be summarized that NFC will be the logical successor of QR-Codes.