Smartphones provide a powerful platform for augmented reality (AR). Using a smartphone’s camera together with the built in GPS, compass, gyroscope, and touch screen enables the real world environment to be overlaid with contextual digital information. The creation of mobile AR environments is relatively simple, with the development of mobile AR browsers such as Wikitude and Layar that provide simple tools for user AR content creation and sharing. In this paper we illustrate how these tools can be used within collaborative educational contexts based upon five projects that we have implemented from 2011 to 2015. Throughout these five projects we explored how we could use a mash up of mobile social media to design collaborative learner-generated mobile AR projects in a variety of higher education curriculum contexts. Via a meta analysis of the five projects the paper develops a pragmatic framework for implementing mobile AR to facilitate learner-generated projects, with a particular focus upon enabling new pedagogical strategies.