Tools of Contextualization: Extending the Classroom to ... - CiteSeerX

Tools of Contextualization: Extending the Classroom to the Field Niels Olof Bouvin Christina Brodersen Frank Allan Hansen

Dept. of Computer Science University of Aarhus, Denmark

ABSTRACT Project based education is becoming an increasingly important work form in elementary schools while still quite poorly technologically supported, particularly with respect to actively taking advantage of contextual information. Based on an empirical study of teaching and in particular project based education in Danish elementary schools, we present the HyConExplorer, a geo-spatial hypermedia system that supports project based education and learning outside of the classroom through contextualisation of information. More specifically, the HyConExplorer provides means for: browsing with your feet, annotating the world, and overview at a glance.

1.

Ole Sejer Iversen Peter Nørregaard Dept. of Information and Media Sciences University of Aarhus, Denmark

mation in project based education. The development in pervasive and mobile technology makes it possible to combine digital information with the physical environment and enables the pupils to carry a digital context around with them. We see great potential in using knowledge about location and purpose to frame the information made available at a given point in time and space and to let teachers and pupils play an active part in building the digital context made available on site and sharing it with others.

INTRODUCTION

The face of elementary school education in Denmark is changing as political visions shape the pedagogical agenda and technological advances introduce new tools for learning. It is becoming didactically desirable as well as technically possible to move learning outside of the classroom and take advantage of the rich sources of information available beyond books and computer screens. It is e.g., possible to gain basic knowledge of what constitutes working at a construction site by reading a book, but the book cannot convey how work is coordinated, how noisy the environment is, how safety is ensured through the action of the workers etc. Taking a field trip to a construction site is a much richer source of information if we wish to proper grasp working conditions. Schools, however, are ill-equipped in supporting project based education. In particular, the process of collecting, producing and presenting information from heterogeneous sources and working with this information in and out of the classroom; most schools have dedicated computer rooms and Internet connection, but cannot move the digital information outside the computer rooms. While computers with Internet access are definitely a step in the right direction, allowing pupils to reach out beyond the school’s boundaries to support their school work, it is a far cry from moving the learning process out of the classroom and taking advantage of the possibilities for learning in the real world. In particular, we see a general lack in the current educational technology of actively taking advantage of contextual infor-

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Figure 1: Project based education in the field.

Based on an empirical study and extensive work with teachers and pupils from several elementary schools in the ˚ Arhus area during the Networking.Kids project, we identify and describe a number of requirements for project based education taking place in- and outside the classroom. We focus on three aspects of project based education that support learning outside of the classroom through contextualisation of information: • Browsing with your feet: searching and browsing in context; Taking advantage of knowledge about time, place, and purpose when investigating information in the field. • Annotating the world: producing information and writing digital graffiti; Leaving information in the world tied to the physical place where it was created. • Overview at a glance: quickly providing an overview of the available digital material based on contextual meta-data. We present the design and evaluation of the HyConExplorer system, that supports these aspects, and discuss the technical challenges in developing this kind of system. In the following, Section 2 presents the project case, key

characteristics of project based education, implications for design and design challenges in the development of a prototype supporting project work in the field. Section 3 presents the prototype and key features supported. Section 4 describes our first evaluation of the prototype, and, finally, Section 5 discusses future work, and concludes the paper.

2.

CASE

NetWorking.Kids was a twelve month research project aimed at using pervasive and mobile technologies to support the education practice in the Danish school system. The project sought to enhance pupils’ (aged 11-14) ability to collect, produce and present their projects, and to move out of the classroom in order to use real-world environments as a foundation for learning. We primarily worked with a 7th grade class with 20 pupils from Katrinebjerg School located in the central part of ˚ Arhus. The Katrinebjerg School has approximately 530 pupils ranging from first to tenth grade as well as 70 teachers. Other classes from other schools were involved in the project on a regular basis during workshops and prototype evaluations. We employed both traditional and novel methods to gain insight in the pupils’ and teachers’ use practice: Field studies, where we followed the children’s school activities during five months; workshops for design and evaluations [18]; and the digital cultural probe method [15] to chart areas of the children’s lives, which we otherwise had poor or no access to, i.e., after school and family activities. See [14] for a thorough description and discussion of the methods used in the project. The children were involved at different levels depending on the task and the purpose of the activity—from users to design partners, as described in [8]. It is our experience, that each level of participation informs different aspects of design and should be considered carefully with respect to what we, as designers and researchers need to gain from the activity. In this respect, we see our methods relating to and extending the existing research with children, particularly [1, 5, 13, 20] Based on our field studies and design work with the pupils and their teachers, we present the following key characteristics of the activities that occur in the school environment.

2.1

Characteristics of project based education

While traditional classroom teaching is still crucial, project based education is becoming increasingly important in Danish elementary schools. In the following, we will briefly describe some of the phases of project based education and their implications for IT support. The first step of a project is typically to decide on the theme, usually facilitated by the teacher. Based on this, the pupils investigate different, often disparate sources of information to develop an overview of the available material relating to the project theme. This process is sometimes documented through a textual project log. Often, the entire class will go on a field trip to a place relevant to the overall project theme. Going beyond the classroom boundaries is central to the project based education and the learning process. The children may be provided with cameras and notebooks allowing them to capture information on-site and establish for themselves the purpose of their visit, but we wish to aid this process further. We wish to enable the pupils to find relevant information through browsing and searching in available material (often tied to the location) and to contribute to the shared repository by leaving information behind. In other words, we wish to make the context of the pupils’ learning experience explicit and malleable. Through the entire project, the pupils are engaged in collecting and producing new information. This process is particularly challenging during field trips, as the children have

to keep track of the material they collect and produce, e.g., where and why something was collected. We wish to support this process by making it easier for the pupils to maintain an overview of the visited places and the gathered material. Ultimately, the pupil gives a presentation in class and receives an evaluation from their teacher and peers. The presentation is prepared based on the collected material, the project log, and the knowledge gathered during the project. Thus, we focus on three aspects of project based education that supports learning outside of the classroom through contextualisation of information: browsing with your feet: searching and browsing in context; annotating the world : writing digital graffiti; and overview at a glance: quickly providing an overview of the collection of digital material. As the challenges, tasks, and physical settings change during the different phases of the project, the IT support must also be flexible, allowing the pupils to choose the right tool depending on task and surroundings. We support this in the HyConExplorer prototype through seamless integration of various clients (SmartPhones, tablet PCs, and Web-based interfaces).

2.1.1

Browsing with your feet

Searching and browsing on-site can be dramatically improved using mobile technology. When pupils are traversing the city, they will often need information about the place, they are moving through or are standing in front of. By using knowledge about the user’s location, we focus the search and browsing space and can drastically improve the number and relevance of the search results. We refer to the concept of tying contextual information about place and time to the search action as “browsing with your feet”.

2.1.2

Annotating the World

We see great potential for supporting the pupils’ project activities outside of the classroom by enabling them to produce material on-site tied to the location. The pupils can leave traces of their ongoing activities in the environment, that can be revisited later or “bumped into” by others as they travel through the same zone. We denote this “digital graffiti”.

2.1.3

Overview at a glance

Knowing what you have done and where you have been are important aspects of most project presentations. In this context, we see great advantage in capturing information about where the children have been, when they were there, and what they added to the collection of digital material. The collection and preservation of the contextual information can be used to create an overview of the process, and allow the children to retrospectively trace their journey, project material, and knowledge building both spatially, temporally, and conceptually. Section 3 describes how the three aspects are supported in the design of the HyCon framework and HyConExplorer prototypes.

2.2

Related work

We have been inspired by a number of projects that aim to move education out of the classroom. Ambient Wood [19, 24] is a fine example of how we may move education out of the classroom. Their goal were to provide pupils with: “contextually-relevant digital information during their explorations of the woodland at pertinent times that would provoke them to reflect and discuss among themselves and the facilitators its significance and implications for what else was around them.” [24, p. 4-5]

Learning Lab Denmark1 has developed a compelling Webbased role-playing game (Case/Melved) for the 7 − 10th grade. Working as forensic detectives, the pupils use e.g., the physics and chemistry facilities to solve problems, but the game design is concerned neither with how the pupils can carry digital information with them to the labs nor how they can take advantage of the current context [17]. Gayet al. [10] present some interesting pedagogically founded perspectives on how mobile technology may support the natural science subjects in the field, e.g., data gathering and cooperative learning. However, as with Case/Melved they do not consider how context-specific information and services can support the field work. We acknowledge and agree with the importance of supporting reflected learning but we also see a great need and great possibilities in supporting constructive contextual feedback from the pupils, allowing them to produce material tied to the current activity and location. Providing teachers and pupils with tools of contextualisation is thus key support the learning process in the field and project based education in general.

2.2.1

Technical related work

The ability to contextualize information according to e.g., location is not unique to an educational setting and has seen considerable work of the past years. Context-aware Computing [21; 25, p. 21] is not a new phenomenon, but only recently has computer, display and GPS technologies become sufficiently compact and powerful to make highly portable systems feasible. We have earlier reported on our own work with geo-spatial hypermedia [12, 3]. A number of systems accommodate and support users’ context. These systems range from tourists’ guides, such as GUIDE [4] to systems aiming at helping users navigate and explore large office spaces (e.g., PARCTab [23]), university campuses (the Touring Machine [9]) or museums as seen in the EQUATOR City project [16]. A common theme with many existing context-aware systems is the use of context for browsing purposes, i.e., serving information bound to a certain location. This reduces the cognitive overhead of browsing for relevant information, and can as such be successfully employed in an educational setting as described in Section 2.1.1. As we expect the pupils to collect and structure information in the field, we also need to support authoring of new material with our system, and this on-site authoring is one of the major differences between most context-aware systems and our own.

2.3

Implications for Design

As has been described above, learning and school work do no longer take place solely in the classroom. It will often be geographically dispersed with pupils out on assignments exploring and collecting information later to be presented to the whole class. This kind of activity imposes a number of requirements on any potential technology support. The tools should be portable (i.e., lightweight, sturdy, and battery-powered), usable while standing or walking (eliminating ordinary laptop computers as potential platforms as well as calling for a keyboard-less system), support browsing (so a display and pointing device is necessary), handle multimedia input (as text input is cumbersome without a keyboard), preferably be connected to the Internet, and able to relate location with data. It became clear to us as we explored these constraints, that it would be difficult to find a single solution to accommodate all needs, as some of these needs are contradicting. High portability implies small size, which restricts screen size and hampers usability. Network connectivity and portability are at odds, as bandwidth will be limited in the 1

http://www.lld.dk/

Bluetooth enabled GPS receiver

Bluetooth and GRPS enabled cell phone

HyConExplorer software

Tablet PC

Video camera

Tablet pen

Figure 2: Mobile devices used to run the HyConExplorer.

field (as well as expensive and battery draining). Cost was also a consideration—ideally, schools should be able equip a number of groups or individual pupils with the necessary tools. The characteristics of the different devices under consideration are summarized in Table 1. If anything, this exploration has established that there is currently no “silver bullet” in pervasive technology. One solution does not fit all purposes, and we have found it necessary to use a number of technologies alone and in combination. We equipped some pupils with GPS units and camera phones supporting image, video, and sound capture, and others with the complete hardware setup shown in Figure 2 consisting of a GPS unit, GPRS phone for network connectivity, and a tablet PC. The pupils’ excursions were not only meant to let them populate an empty information space, but also “bump” into prepared information at certain locations. This serendipitously obtained information could be of a didactic nature created by their teachers (e.g., specific tasks or challenges), made available by e.g., museums, environmental initiatives, or the local board of tourism, or left by other students in the form of “digital graffiti”, as described in Section 2.1.2. The students were free to use the HyConExplorer to place arbitrary information in the field and thus weaving a tapestry of (more or less) meaningful trails and hot spots across the landscape, as described in Section 3.2. Apart from deliberately annotated locations created by either teachers or other pupils, our Geo-based Browsing (GSB, described in more detail in Section 3.1.2) provided the pupils with information extracted from the Web based on their current location. The above described considerations led us to design a context based system, able to automatically respond to changes in, e.g., location (while location is the main focus of the described system, there is much more to context than location [22]). The HyConExplorer prototype has been developed in two versions: one version consisting of a tablet PC coupled with a camera, a Bluetooth GPS receiver, and a Bluetooth equipped GPRS mobile phone serving as Internet connection; and another version consisting of software running directly on the mobile phone thus providing a much simpler setup of just the phone and the Bluetooth GPS receiver (see Figure 2 and Figure 3).

3.

PROTOTYPE

The HyConExplorer (prototype hardware seen in Figure 2) provides the user with a general location-aware hyperme-

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Portability Connectivity Roaming bandwidth Reliability Battery life Performance Screen size Text entry

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Table 1: Heterogeneous tools for heterogeneous tasks. Values range from +++ (excellent) to – (poor). Values in parentheses denotes performance when connected to a WiFi network. dia tool. This section describes the design of the HyConExplorer with a special focus on an educational setting—for more elaborate architectural and implementation details as well as details on how the HyCon framework supports seamless integration of various clients (SmartPhones, tablet PCs, and Web-based interfaces), see [3, 12]. The HyConExplorer is designed to let users working in the field access and produce situated information related to their context. The basic concept of the HyConExplorer is to augment physical space with digital information structures. Typically, these structures are anchored to physical locations or addresses, and hence the system can be thought of as providing overlays of situated information on maps of cities and places. GPS sensor data is used as the primary controlling mechanism in the system for information selection and presentation. As a proper hypermedia tool the HyConExplorer goes beyond merely providing information based on the user’s location or general context. Users can create rich media annotations, links, and guided tours through information resources and automatically tag the resources with captured context information (GPS (x, y)-coordinates, time, and creator information is used in the current prototype) for later retrieval. The HyConExplorer prototype is thus not just a context-aware browsing and navigation system, but a complete context-aware hypermedia system allowing users to create situated documents from images, movies, and audio captured with the phone’s or tablet PC’s video camera (see Figure 2). Dey [6, 7] states that there are three types of context-aware application support: presentation of information and services, automatic execution of services, and tagging of context to information to support later retrieval. The HyConExplorer illustrates all three modes of operation, and it enables users to freely annotate and link while in the field. To support the work cycle of project based education as described in Section 2.1, we have implemented mechanisms in the prototypes supporting both access to existing digital information, and production and gathering of information in context. These mechanisms are described below according to our foci: browsing with your feet, annotating the world, and overview at a glance.

3.1 3.1.1

Browsing with your feet Information browsing in context

One of the most important issues in gathering information about a given topic is knowing where to find it. Connecting relevant information (from the municipal office, the tourist office, the teacher, or other pupils) to an area will aid the pupils in finding information that will help them

(a) HyConExplorer on the tablet PC

(b) HyConExplorer on the SmartPhone Figure 3: Browsing annotations and Web pages with the HyConExplorer prototype. Dots on the map correspond to links between pieces of information and physical locations.

understand the topic better. Thus, contextually enhanced browsing supports the process of collecting (and, to some extend, producing) materials for the project. HyConExplorer supports two interaction patterns for information browsing: one is letting the browsing be controlled by input from sensor equipment (typically a GPS receiver) and the other is letting the user explicitly control the browsing. These two modalities can be described as direct physical navigation and indirect representational navigation [11] . Direct physical navigation is the type of browsing typically employed by car navigation systems, guide systems, and tourist information systems. Direct physical navigation expects the user to browse information by changing para-

meters in the physical context. Walking or driving from one location to another will affect parameters such as time and location in the physical context, allowing the system to find information associated with the new context. When engaged in this type of browsing, no direct user intervention is required. The user is “browsing information with the feet”, simple by moving about in the world. Behind the scenes, the system gathers contextual data from the physical environment and maps it to tagged information (annotations, linked documents, and guided tours). We see this kind of browsing as being useful especially while the user is in the field using small mobile devices with limited display capabilities and poor support for browsing through large collections (perhaps through multiple layers of menus or lists) of documents. “Bumping into” information in this manner also supports the concept of serendipity: finding something valuable while searching for something entirely different, which is extremely difficult to design for but very valuable to the learning experience. However, it is not desirable to require the user to physically move to a given location to order to access the information associated with it. When the pupils e.g., return from a field trip, they should be able to browse the information created or discovered, while they were in the field. Similarly, when encountering a guided tour in the field, the system should allow the user to browse through the tour stops without having to physically walk to the individual locations. Thus, the user may investigate the information before deciding whether physically following the tour is actually worthwhile. Indirect representational navigation allows in this way the user to navigate information associated with remote locations by specifying a virtual location in the system. This creates a “what if I was there?”-scenario, where the system presents the information associated with the virtual context. The user can in the HyConExplorer prototype disable the GPS sensor and simple click on the map to specify a virtual location for investigation.

3.1.2

Information search in context

The annotation and browsing facilities in HyConExplorer are targeted especially towards user created information. However, much existing information is readily available on the Web and indexed by search engines like Google. Children are familiar with Web based search engines so it is tempting to make this kind of functionality available through the system. Information search in context provides the pupils with a strong tool for finding information in a large repository by relating it to its location, thus minimizing the potential information overload and making it easier to find and collect materials for the project (compared to a similar search done e.g. at the school). This is particularly important to reduce information overload when using a limited technology like the mobile phones. Ordinary Web searches based on keywords return results matching the topic of interest, but the pages will typically be completely unrelated to the geographic location of the user. However, many Web sites related to locations (such as landmarks and most businesses) include their postal addresses on their pages and this (textual) information is indexed by search engines. Thus, using search criteria created as a combination of keywords and postal addresses can be used to find pages covering a specific topic and related to a specific location. This technique is e.g., exemplified by Google’s “Search by Location” service2 . In GIS systems the term geocoding refers to the process of assigning a (x, y)/latitude-longitude coordinate to a piece of information, typically an address. Once the coordinate has been assigned, the address can be displayed on a map 2

http://labs.google.com/location/

or otherwise used by the system. Reverse geocoding deals with the task of getting information about a location given a coordinate. The HyConExplorer prototype supports a novel reverse geocoding technique which we have termed Geo-Based Search (GBS). In essence, GBS is a search engine query3 augmented with information about the user’s current location. The goal of GBS is to focus search results to pages covering both a topic of interest (specified by user supplied keywords) and the particular geographical area the user is located in (specified by postal addresses computed from UTM (x, y)-coordinates from the GPS sensor). For an in-depth discussion of the HyCon GBS implementation see [3]. GBS is an example of the last type of context-aware application support described by Dey [7, 6] (see Section 2.3), namely automatic execution of services: as the user’s position changes GBS continuously searches the Web for information related to the current location. GBS also demonstrates a simple, but novel technique of integrating existing information, which has not in advance been prepared for context-aware applications, into a mobile, context-aware system such as HyConExplorer.

3.2

Annotating the world

Producing material for the project is usually done after the field study when the pupils have returned to their home room where they can reflect on the day and have access to good resources for the production process. However, it is much more desirable to initiate this production of project material in the setting it originated from and relates to because the pupil is in the situation rather than thinking back on what happened 2 hours ago. Furthermore, leaving traces of project-activities behind by tying picture-, text- or videoannotations to a physical location allows the pupils to revisit the information in context or lets other pupils with a similar project “bump into” this and use it to enhance their own work. In this way, the layers of annotations will eventually form a rich tapestry of information. Combining mobile devices with built-in cameras and microphones (e.g., mobile phones or our prototype tablet PC) and cheap sensor equipment such as GPS receivers makes it possible to create photo, video, and audio documents and automatically tag them with contextual meta-data captured by the sensors. The annotation facilities in HyConExplorer utilize this combination to support linking of digital annotations to physical locations by tagging the annotation documents with location information. Thus, the augmentation of locations is done computationally without having to insert physical tags (e.g., RFID or visual tags) in the physical world. Annotations can take several forms. A simple annotation consisting of a photo and a link to a given location can be used as a form of “digital graffiti” stating “I was here” to other visitors later visiting the same location. More elaborate annotations featuring photos, videos, and textual descriptions can be used to document or comment on the location or situation in which they were created. Furthermore, external resources such as Web pages (e.g., GBS results) can also be linked to locations allowing for easy integration of existing information into the system. Annotations in the prototype are modeled as objects with associations to other objects in the model—this can be locationobjects but also other annotation-objects or linked documents. This supports a very flexible annotation system allowing annotations to be used as both documentation of locations and as comments on other user’s documents. Entire discussion threads can in this way be created and anchored 3 The current GBS implementation utilizes the Google Web APIs: http://www.google.com/apis/, to perform the actual searches.

in a physical context. This mechanism is especially useful when commenting on existing information, e.g., information prepared in the planning phase of the project. Information created by the pupils can through the annotation mechanism be further documented and questions asked by the teacher can be annotated with answers while the pupils are in the field. Collections of annotations may also be used to created guided tours through a number of locations. Guided tours are implemented as trails of links between locations with associated annotation systems. Teachers can use the guided tour mechanism when preparing a field trip: Web pages and documents created or found by the teacher can be linked to locations before the field trip and a suggested path linking the locations can be created as a guided tour. The pupils can follow the tour in the field, investigate the linked resources, and add their own findings as comments or answers to the teacher’s material. The prototype includes a trail blazer module for creating and investigating guided tours (see Figure 3).

3.3

Overview at a glance

One of the identified issues in the current praxis of project based education (see Section 2.1) is the challenges of creating situated documentation while in the field. A note written on paper may make sense while being written at a certain location, but the children have to manually keep track of the connection between the written notes and the situations and locations they comment on (where, when and why was a note created?). A strong point of the HyConExplorer prototype is that it tags every piece of produced information with context information, thus allowing it to be reviewed back in the classroom according to the context of its creation.

Figure 4: The HyConExploer presentation module. Support for the preparation of the final presentation of the project is realized through a number of functions in the HyConExplorer prototypes. The tablet PC software has an built-in presentation module (see Figure 4) which supports the creation of PowerPoint-like presentations from the gathered information. Using indirect representational browsing the pupils can pin-point virtual locations on the map and create presentations from the linked information using a simple drag-and-drop interface. If the presentation requires extra information not available through the HyConExplorer (e.g., information gathered from Web pages or scanned from other teaching material) the HyCon framework includes a simple Web service supporting browsing of annotations based on time, location, and creator information. Using a standard Web browser,

the pupils can copy HyConExplorer maps together with the information created in the field and paste it into an external presentation or report. Even though the gathered information is accessed through a Web browser, it is still presented with the gathered context information (time, creator, and locations on maps) and is thus anchored to the context in which it was created.

4.

EVALUATION

We have performed a number of test runs of the HyConExplorer prototype with different schools in the Aarhus area. The most recent and exhaustive evaluation was a one-day evaluation with 12 sixth–seventh grade pupils and three teachers from Katrinebjerg school, Kjellerup school and Skovvang school. As argued above, the prototype is well-suited for an outdoors project, and we formulated together with teachers a “Our City” themed project, where the children should explore and document parts of ˚ Arhus for later presentation in plenum. The pupils were divided into three groups with four pupils in each, each group representing their school. We wanted to see how the prototype acted as an aid for both teachers and pupils so our first goal was to let the teachers gain experience with the HyConExplorer by having them populate parts of ˚ Arhus with links and annotations in preparation for the field trip. This was largely done using indirect representational navigation as described in Section 3.1 and the teachers all chose the tablet prototype for this task. Thus, the teachers were able to furnish their pupils with information, suggested trails to follow, and questions and challenges to be met. The teachers were well-satisfied with the level of detail on the maps and found the system easy to navigate. Using the integrated Web browser, they were able find additional information and link and annotate as they saw fit. At the end of the task, the teachers had created two - three helpful annotations for each group. None of the teachers had seen the prototypes before. Consequently, they spent a great deal of the allotted time for preparation getting accustomed to the interface and functionality which accounts for the relatively low number of annotations created. Having populated our databases, the next step was to put the HyConExplorer prototypes to the test with the pupils. The three groups of pupils covered different parts of town. They had all previously been briefly familiarized with the prototype and its use. Each group was accompanied with two persons for recording the experiment and providing technical support. Each group was assigned a HyConExplorer prototype: two groups were equipped with tablet prototypes and the last group was given the SmartPhone prototype Using the HyConExplorer on SmartPhones and tablet PCs, the children browsed existing links and annotations as well as added their own material. They explored their assigned part of town, took pictures, interviewed people, and otherwise collected information for later use. Each group created four - five annotations during the field trip. None of the groups found a need for contacting their teacher; the accompanying researchers observed no major crisis amongst the groups that required support from home. Unfortunately, our set-up didn’t allow for us to log the number of annotations they pupils read during the field trip or the number of times they read the same annotation so we have insufficient data on this. In a future evaluation, this will be included in the logging process. Upon return to their classroom, they used the gathered material to create a presentation for the entire class. During this process, they reviewed their annotations and added to the text-entries which had been entered quickly and in a fragmented fashion (through e.g. keywords describing the situation) in the field. The two groups us-

ing the tablet PC’s used the HyConExplorer prototype to make their presentation while the group using SmartPhones exported their annotations to PC’s and did their presentations in PowerPoint. With the automated geo-tagging of annotations, photos etc., which created a visual trail on the map, it was easy for the groups with the tablet-based prototypes to recall the context of each collected piece of information. The major points of critique leveled against the HyConExplorer was not the software itself, but its physical context during the field trip. As shown in Figure 2, the HyConExplorer tablet PC prototype consists of a number of devices. These devices must all be present for the system to function. Several problems were encountered when using the tabletbased prototype: the children found the tablet PC heavy; had occasional problems when the child carrying the mobile phone providing the Internet connection wandered too far off for the Bluetooth connection to reach; the tablet PC did not work too well in rainy conditions; the handwritingrecognition software performed too poorly; the digital keyboard was very cumbersome to use for text input; and the GPRS network connection was too slow and too unreliable4 , reflecting the conclusions reached in Section 2.3. The evaluation was not long enough for the children to experience battery problems. On the other hand, the children were much better at handling the simple setup consisting of only the SmartPhone and GPS. In contrast to the tablet PC prototype, the phones were to a smaller degree used to examine the information structures present in the different parts of town and so the waiting time was less of a nuisance. The children mainly used the phones to quickly create photos and comments as they went about. Furthermore, inputting text on the phones turned out not to be a big obstacle as we had expected. This is probably due to the children’s existing experience with camera phones and text entry thereon—the phone is not a strange device but a familiar object used on a daily basis. Based on the experiences we gained from the tests we found that the tablet PC software works well as a tool for the teachers in preparing and organising information for the field trip and as a context-aware presentation tool which can be used by the pupils when they return back to the classroom. In the classroom, the overview and structuring mechanisms in the HyConExplorer are more important than the size and weight of the hardware; it is vital for the students ability to assess their collection of project material. There is no doubt that the tablet provided a superiour overview compared to the SmartPhone’s relatively small screen which was also reflected in the teacher’s clear choice of the tablet over the SmartPhone interface and the pupils’ rejection of the Smartphone prototype when preparing their presentation. In the field, however, the simple phone setup turned out to be a much more elegant and usable solution than the tablet PCs. The strenght of using a GPS-device is that the prototype automatically supplies the user with information relative to where they are; when the pupils moved through town and found an interesting spot, the HyConExplorer SmartPhone prototype showed them the map and annotations centered around their current location. In the field, location takes priority over overview and the evaluation clearly supports this finding. From a learning perspective, the HyConExplorer prototypes provide both teachers and students with a set of powerful tools for teaching and learning in the real world. The HyConExplorer prototypes provide teachers and pupils with means for extending the classroom into the real world but also to bring pieces and paths of the real world back into 4 This was especially problematic, as all maps used by the HyConExplorer are downloaded on the fly.

the classroom with them. Project work is supported on several different levels: taking advantage of the rich contextual information that is the real world; providing easy access to information related to the location you are currently in; easy capture of rich media (pictures, video, audio, text) annotations that are tied to your current location; providing an overview of the path you have traveled and the annotations created in the process. The HyConExplorer prototypes elegantly saves collections of material that must ordinarily be retrieved from disparate sources and helps the students in tying them together through the context in which they were experienced. However, one important issue is yet to be researched: the collaborative weaving of the fabric of information related to places and occasions. We may elaborate on this as more pupils and teachers use the prototypes and leave traces of their activities while at the same time allowing others to “bump into” their annotations as they traverse the same environment, be it the city center, the forest habitat, the local church or the science museum. We are looking forward to conducting more evaluations of the prototypes that may shed more light on these issues.

5.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

We have herein described our progress in providing pupils with technology to support project based education. The HyCon Explorer was propagated as a geo-spacial hypermedia system that supports project based education and learning outside of the classroom through contextualization. Geospatial hypermedia has many uses, and has in this context been shown to work well in an educational setting. We have in this paper explored the space between the changes in educational approach and the advances in portable technology by providing pupils with a context based and location aware hypermedia system providing situated information. HyCon Explorer is developed with respect to findings from field studies conducted in Danish elementary schools. By analyzing these field studies in the Networking.Kids project we isolated three aspects of project-based education that could benefit from contextualization of information: Searching and browsing in context, producing information and digital graffiti and getting an overview of large amounts of digital material. As a response to these needs the HyConExplorer provides the pupils the ability to browse with their feet, to annotate the world and to get an overview over their digital material a glance. During evaluation sessions, The HyConExplorer was well accepted among the participating pupils. The HyConExplorer is a research effort into future it supported education, Furthermore, the development of HyConExplorer contributed to reflections in the context of geospacial hypermedia as well. Our experiences have shown us that while there is currently not a one single technology platform that fits all our requirements, this is necessarily not impediment. One size does not necessarily fit all, nor does it need to there are different tools for different purposes for a reason. Another insight that will be explored further is that devices need not be connected to provide synergy. e.g., if a user has a GPS logger, the recorded position can at a later combined with photos taken with a digital camera, as such photos are time stamped. This incidental coherence is valuable as many of our digital tools generate meta-data that can be correlated. An information system will often be judged less by what it can do and more by what it contains or offers access to. By utilizing Geo-based Search, users can leverage the information available on the Web and not only rely on the data specially entered into the system. Browsing with your feet is an intuitive process, but the combination of this and the ability to freely annotate, link and otherwise structure in the field is especially worthwhile, and will

only become more appealing as portable technology catches up. As teachers and pupils actively add to the collection of information, the digital context will grow and inspire others to contribute as they traverse the physical environment and bump into it. Taking active part in the construction of knowledge supports the pedagogical vision for Danish elementary school education and is in tune with the ancient teaching credo: “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand” (Confucius, ca. 450 BC).

Acknowledgments We are indebted to the pupils and teachers at Katrinebjerg Skole, Skovvang Skolen and Kjellerup Skole who participated in the Networking.Kids project activities with great enthusiasm and provided us with a valuable understanding of what constitutes learning in Danish elementary schools. The work has been funded by the Danish National Center of IT research through project #333, ContextIT. ContextIT is associated the Center for Pervasive Computing5 .

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