July 2007 Volume 10 Number 3 - Educational Technology & Society

if the source of this knowledge is very near to his physical location. In order to solve this problem a ubiquitous
computing environment is presented to support the learner while doing a task, this environment is called PERKAM.
It allows the learners to share knowledge, interact, collaborate, and exchange individual experiences. This
environment provides the learners with Knowledge Awareness Maps that visualize the environmental objects space
that surround the learner, the educational materials and the peer helpers’ space. PERKAM recommends the
educational materials according to how much their topics match with the learner’s current task and how near their
physical locations are to the learner’s current location. On the other hand, it recommends the peer helpers according
to how much their interests match with the learner’s current task and how near are their locations to the learner’s
current location.
The experiment was done in order to evaluate the system usage, efficacy and the learner’s satisfaction. The proposed
experiment is based on learn by doing model. The experiment and the questionnaire results indicated that Knowledge
Awareness Map is useful to understand the learner’s situation and efficiently recommends the suitable peer helpers.
Also, the results showed that it is useful to use the system in the collaborative learning and to improve the learners’
knowledge and skills.
The proposed future work is to design more experiments to evaluate the system in different learning fields, add new
features such as recommending video clips as learning materials, and to improve the peer helpers recommendation
algorithm depending on the sameness between the learner’s current situation and the peer helper’s pervious
situations.
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