Introduction to location-based mobile learning

[About the book] The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series and is edited by Elizabeth Brown with a foreword from Mike Sharples. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. There is also a debate about whether location-based and contextual learning results in shallower learning strategies and a section detailing the future challenges for location-based learning

Applying New Technologies to Upgrade Non-English Speakers’ English Speaking Skills

As technologies are getting more and more advanced, modernized information technologies start to step into the field of education. The application of multimedia- assisted instruction is getting more and more popular. This can stimulate students’ interests as well as promote students’ development and improve teaching efficiency. Teachers’ work should be student centered, and teachers’ function is to provide help and guidance in students’ studies. With the introduction of new technologies, students start to be fond of having classes. They start to have interests in studies. This can create a positive learning environment to students, which meets the social requirements of this era. This project is to provide some ideas and methods of applying new technologies in English instruction to expose students in a more authentic learning environment and improve their speaking skills

Augmenting the field experience: a student-led comparison of techniques and technologies

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project

ENGLISH LANGUAGE INTSTRUCTION IN CULTURAL MANAGEMENT

Cultural Management is one of the three courses of universitarian interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate Cultural Studies, the first of a kind at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University in Osijek. The course is based on a common original module of Cultural Studies, providing for a foundation of general theoretical knowledge intrinsic to the interdisciplinary studies, whereby Cultural Studies are a multidisciplinary area with a versatile research objective and methodological framework, encompassing a wide spectrum of analytical fields dealing with culture. Such a common program is performed within undergraduate and graduate studies, while the Cultural Management course facilitates an acquisition of specialized knowledge, necessary skills, and narrower competencies for an efficacious cultural management. Differentiating education (i.e., an institutionalized form of learning, usually related to a juvenile age) and learning, the English Language instruction within the Cultural Management course endeavors to suppress an inconvenience of “return to the school benches” while promoting a habit of students’ lifelong learning (i.e., of a spontaneous, informal knowledge acquisition irrespective of their age), in conformity with the Croatian Adult Education Strategy. In addition to interdisciplinarity, such an open study model aims to promote an acquisition of theoretical knowledge in various English analytical discourses (e.g., , information science theory, theory of nation, educational theory, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, deconstruction, New Historicism, gender studies, environmental studies, postcolonial studies, subcultural theories, etc.) as well, perplexing it with a professional practice directly

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

Adaptive and Re-adaptive Pedagogies in Higher Education: A Comparative, Longitudinal Study of Their Impact on Professional Competence Development across Diverse Curricula

This study addresses concerns that traditional, lecture-based teaching methods may not sufficiently develop the integrated competencies demanded by modern professional practice. A disconnect exists between conventional pedagogy and desired learning outcomes, prompting increased interest in innovative, student-centered instructional models tailored to competence growth. Despite this, nuanced differences in competence development across diverse university curricula remain underexplored, with research predominantly relying on students’ self-assessments. To address these gaps, this study employs longitudinal mixed-methods approaches with regard to theory triangulation and investigator triangulation to better understand how professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions evolve across varied curricula and contexts. This research emphasizes adaptive and re-adaptive teaching approaches incorporating technology, individualization, and experiential learning, which may uniquely integrate skill development with contextual conceptual learning. Specific attention is paid to professional education paths like design, media, and communications degrees, where contemporary competence models stress capabilities beyond core conceptual knowledge. Results from this study aim to guide reform efforts to optimize professional competence development across diverse academic areas

Rich environments for active learning: a definition

Rich Environments for Active Learning, or REALs, are comprehensive instructional systems that evolve from and are consistent with constructivist philosophies and theories. To embody a constructivist view of learning, REALs: promote study and investigation within authentic contexts; encourage the growth of student responsibility, initiative, decision making, and intentional learning; cultivate collaboration among students and teachers; utilize dynamic, interdisciplinary, generative learning activities that promote higher-order thinking processes to help students develop rich and complex knowledge structures; and assess student progress in content and learning-to-learn within authentic contexts using realistic tasks and performances. REALs provide learning activities that engage students in a continuous collaborative process of building and reshaping understanding as a natural consequence of their experiences and interactions within learning environments that authentically reflect the world around them. In this way, REALs are a response to educational practices that promote the development of inert knowledge, such as conventional teacher-to-student knowledge-transfer activities. In this article, we describe and organize the shared elements of REALs, including the theoretical foundations and instructional strategies to provide a common ground for discussion. We compare existing assumptions underlying education with new assumptions that promote problem-solving and higher-level thinking. Next, we examine the theoretical foundation that supports these new assumptions. Finally, we describe how REALs promote these new assumptions within a constructivist framework, defining each REAL attribute and providing supporting examples of REAL strategies in action

Educational influences in learning with visual narratives

In this presentation, we intend to show, through the use of digital video, our understanding of ontological values of a web of betweenness and pedagogy of the unique (Farren, 2004) as they are lived in practice with students, in this case, practitioner-researchers on award bearing programmes. We both work with a sense of research-based professionalism in which we are seeking to improve our educational practice with our students in action research enquiries 'how do I improve what I am doing?' The visual narratives, in the form of digital video clips, of our educational practice, include our engagement with practitioner-researchers as we seek to understand our educational influences in their learning so that we can "influence the education of social formation" (Whitehead, 2004a & b). This relates to the idea of social formations as defined by Bourdieu (1990) and points to the way people organise their interactions according to a set of regulatory values that can take the form of rules. In studying our own education practice, with the help of digital video, we hope to influence the education of social formations so that others will begin to question their underlying values, assumptions and epistemologies that inform their practice. The purpose of this paper is to communicate to a wider audience and network with other higher education educators through visual narratives of our work in higher education. There is a lack of research in how educators in higher education are influencing the education of their students. This area of research is one which we develop through this paper