Introducing Location - Awareness into a Learning ... - CiteSeerX

The 1st International Conference on Virtual Learning, ICVL 2006

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Introducing Location - Awareness into a Learning Environment Supported by Mobile Devices Ivica Boticki1, Vedran Mornar1, Natasa Hoic–Bozic2 (1) Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing Unska 3, 10000 Zagreb, CROATIA E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] (2) Faculty of Philosophy Omladinska 14, 51000 Rijeka, CROATIA E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract This paper describes a location – aware enhancement of a learning environment supported by mobile devices. Such an extension is proposed in order to facilitate the learning process and to provide a solid framework for introducing a more situative approach to learning and teaching into an everyday classroom experience. Introducing location sensing into an existing system creates a framework not only to determine students' locations in a learning environment but to introduce context – awareness and location - awareness into the learning process as well. What is more, location – awareness is a solid base for numerous services in a modern – mobile device supported learning environment since looking into the summary data on students' locations gives a better insight into their habits and needs, both individual and within a group. It is our belief that location – awareness presents a significant step towards creating a learning environment even more oriented to students and their needs. The paper presents an implementation of a location – aware extension of an existing system that uses mobile devices to support a learning environment, reporting module which uses acquired location data, discusses technology requirements and limitations and deals with privacy and security issues.

Keywords: Context – awareness, location – awareness, learning environment, mobile devices

1 Introduction The new era of pervasive and ubiquitous computing opens variety of possibilities for enhancement of everyday human activities. Nowadays, compact mobile devices are suitable for carrying around and therefore generate a completely new set of

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Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Bucharest

possibilities to be explored. Their high computing capabilities, connectivity possibilities, portability and miniature design allow seamless integration into people’s everyday lives and therefore strongly support recently very popular anytime and anywhere paradigm. Modern computer applications tend to be more and more oriented to their users. In addition to suitable ergonomics and intuitive graphical user interface, that present today’s industry standard, a more appealing paradigm, called context aware computing, has emerged. This relatively new paradigm entices the development of applications which invisibly adapt their behaviour and appearance by sensing the context of use. Context in which an application is used can be sensed in numerous ways using various sensors. This article affirms location as one of the most important possibilities of acquiring contextual information and shortly looks into the possibilities of today’s mobile devices when location – awareness is concerned and discusses traits of the presented approaches. It also describes a location aware - extension of an application aimed at supporting and enhancing a learning environment (Traxler and Riordan, 2004; Kukulska-Hulme and Traxler, 2005; Boticki et al, 2006). Benefits of introducing contextual information into such an application together with privacy, security issues and future plans are demonstrated and discussed.

2 Context and Context – Awareness 2.1 Contextual Information To enhance applications’ usability and adaptiveness, a special kind of information, called context, to which application should adapt without explicit user intervention, need to be available (Baldauf et al, 2004). Only by having context as a first class concept in mind when designing systems’ architecture, complete user – centric scenario can be achieved (Chen and Kotz, 2000). There are many definitions of context, ranging from quite specific in terms of the components it has to include to the more theoretical ones which only state its basic principle. When defining context in computing, broad theoretical definitions are to be avoided (Chen and Kotz, 2000). Probably the most popular and quoted definition refers to context as to “any information that can be used to characterize the situation of entities (whether a person, place or object) that are considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and the application themselves” (Dey and Abowd, 2000). Another notable definition, by Brown, describes context as “the elements of the user’s environment which the computer knows about” (Brown, 1996). Probably the most straightforward definition sees context as “the user’s location, environment, identity and time” (Ryan et al, 1997). Dey and Abowd summarize these definitions and distinguish three distinctive entities when context is concerned: places, people and things. Each of these entities can be described by its identity, location and status (Dey and Abowd, 2001). By knowing these elements, context becomes more suitable for integration into various computer applications.


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2.2 Location as a Part of Context Location is considered to be a crucial part of context. Hazas, Scott and Krumm suggest that "location data can be used to infer higher-level contextual information" and see location as a "crucial component of context" (Hazas et al, 2004), while Steggles bravely affirms accurate location as "99% of the battle" when applying contextual information (Abowd et al, 1999). Furthermore, Baldauf describes location as "the far most frequently used attribute of context" (Baldauf et al, 2004). 2.3 Context – Awareness With applications for mobile devices in mind, using contextual information has a crucial role since it can dramatically improve applications' usability and adaptivity and therefore enhance interaction (Hoic-Bozic, N., 2005; Hoic-Bozic et al, 2005). Inherent limitation of mobile devices additionally stress the need of incorporating context into such applications. Contextual information can be made available by utilizing different sensing techniques and sensor fusion (Schmidt, 1998; Schmidt et al, 1999; Chen and Kotz, 2000; Capra, 2002; ), but the art of actually using available contextual information, usually referred to as context – awareness, so that applications, and therefore users, can benefit from enhanced adaptivity and usability remains a challenging problem for application developers (Chen and Kotz, 2000). Baldauf defines context – aware systems as the ones "able to adapt their operations to the current context without explicit user intervention and thus aim at increasing usability and effectiveness by taking environmental context into account" (Baldauf et al, 2004). Some definitions are more general and define context – awareness as "the use of context to provide task-relevant information and / or services to a user" or as a "response to changes in environment designed to improve system's performance or to make its behaviour more relevant to the situation in which it is being used" (Abowd et al, 1999). Schmidt sees context – awareness as filtering "the flow of information from application to user, to address the problem of information overload while using contextual information to give additional meaning to the information supplied by the user" (Schmidt et al, 1998). There have been many attempts to summarize main features of contex – aware applications. Schilit proposes the following ones: Proximate selection (using location information to emphasise graphical user interface elements), automatic contextual reconfiguration (reconfiguring software elements due to context changes), contextual information and commands (commands that produce different results depending on the context) and context-triggered actions (simple rules used to govern the adaptation process) (Schilit et al, 1994). Schilit's categorisation is by no means the only one available (Dey and Abowd, 2001) but satisfies this article's scope.

3 Location – Awareness and the Possibilities for Interaction Location information plays a crucial role in enabling context – aware applications. By knowing location a large part of context can be determined or inferred which makes it one of the most powerful tools when designing highly interactive environments with great customizability (Luff and Heath, 1998; Al-Muhtadi et al, 2006). Some authors

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see location information as crucial contextual information (Hazas et al, 2004) and some even suggest that detaching all sensors, apart from the location ones, from the mobile device and placing them into the environment as public infrastructure (Chen and Kotz, 2000) will suffice to determine context. 3.1 Location Methods and Techniques Different methods to determine users' current indoor location such as Cell-ID, EOTD (GSM based methods), A-GPS (both GSM and GPS based) or RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) (Roussos, 2002; QUALCOMM, 2003; Hazas et al, 2004) exist today. Most of these locating techniques are said to be coarse – grained (Hazas et al, 2004). Although better accuracy is always desired, when dealing with indoor location tracking, possibility of relating user to larger entities, such as rooms, will suffice in unambiguously identifying users and providing a sufficient amount of information to accurately determine the context of use. Due to the lowest prices, independence of deployment and ease of implementation RFID has been chosen to be integrated in the system presented in the following chapters. The implementation consists of passive tags (sensors) attached to users' mobile device and readers attached to physical locations (room entrances).

4 A Location – Aware Extension of a Learning Environment Supported by Mobile Devices This section describes a location aware - extension of a learning environment supported by mobile devices, designed as completely user – centric and location – aware to take the advantage of contextual information to adapt to its users. Inherent limitation of mobile devices (small display, limited possibilities of interaction etc.) make context – awareness crucial for adequately and efficiently supporting a learning environment (Figure 1).


Figure 1. Main menu of the presented application

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Figure 2. Predefined group of students and their current locations

One of the most important systems' features is location retrieval: every student can locate his or her colleagues within the learning environment (i.e. whole institution or campus) and group them by preference (i.e. "maths group", "physics group", "coffee buddies", "closest friends" etc.). Members of the predefined groups can be located within the learning environment in a completely transparent manner – device identification numbers, RFID sensors and communication mechanism remain invisible to students and diminish interaction barriers (Figure 2). The system facilitates direct contact with the lecturer by providing students with information on the teacher's current location. Students can find out in which classroom the teacher currently is and check whether he or she is available for a meeting. When wanted, the teacher can enter an invisible mode and become unavailable to students. Student can at any time check his or her schedule (classes he or she has been enroled to) and get detailed information on the classrooms in which the classes are taking place and the set time of his or her lectures. System adapts to the current user by only showing lectures before and after the currently active one and by signalizing the currently active lecture. In addition to that, number of available seats are shown to provide students with information on the possibility of physically joining the lecture (Figure 3).

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Figure 3. Demonstration of proximate selection in a student's schedule

Figure 4. List of non – educational facilities with their fill rate

Availability of "special rooms" like libraries, cantinas and computer laboratories can be checked as well (Figure 4). Proximate selection is used while browsing classrooms to show only those near the current student's location.

5 Location – Based Statistics Contextual data stored in database can be used to generate, what some authors refer to, context history (Chen and Kotz, 2000) or display various location – based statistics. The system uses contextual data to display summarized overview of many different activities like the use of classrooms or student tracking. Statistical reports are hierarchically organized with three main categories: „Class attendance”, „Usage” and „Cheating” with the possibility of visualization using different charts and drill down mechanism. Students’ class attendance can be summarized by semester, course, group or individually displayed for each student.


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Figure 5: The use of location – based statistics in displaying class attendance Probably the most interesting example of using location statistics is when students try to skip classes and / or take tests on someone else’s behalf. In that case, contextual information can be utilized to identify such fraudulent students’ activities. Last but not the least, usage statistics of all available rooms in a learning environment can be checked to identify and deal with under or overpopulated lectures.

6 Privacy, Security Issues and Future Plans When designing user – centred, location based applications, certain amount of sensitive data is used. In the presented system, location data presents a critical security issue and has to be dealt with carefully. System currently provides an option of hiding one's identity when desired, provided enough data has been collected to confirm the presence in a learning environment (Chen and Kotz, 2000). Since, inevitably, some data has to be exposed, special polices have to be adopted to control its dissemination. Security issues are dealt with in every segment of the system but, naturally, borrowed, stolen mobile device or information leakage can become a source of many problems (Al-Muhtadi et al, 2006). These have to be reported to a central authority to be dealt with. In addition to further dealing with privacy and security issues, future plans include the following ♦ mobile collaborative learning support ♦ ad hoc groups of students creation ♦ advanced visualization of a modern location-aware learning environment ♦ exploring interaction patterns ♦ dealing with aggregated student statistics ♦ putting together student's personal profile

7 Conclusion This article has dealt with introducing location – awareness into a learning environment supported by mobile devices. Using mobile devices in an everyday classroom setting is strongly supported by new and emerging mobile learning paradigms and leads towards a more situative approach to learning which can primarily

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be identified by continuously present interaction. It is our belief that integrating context and location – awareness into applications whose primary aim is to support students and teachers engaged into their everyday educational activities can significantly increase applications' adaptivity and usability. By extending a learning environment in such a fashion, students' productivity and interest for the learning process is expected to rise thereby creating an alternative learning environment based on constant interaction and active participation.

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