January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

poetry appreciation activities in context-aware ubiquitous learning environment so that both students’ and teachers’
attitudes toward the use of system were investigated.
The folksonomy used in this work is collected by the Chinese Poetry Learning Website
(http://140.113.167.118:8080/intention2). We obtained a subset of tag data by selecting all tags from users who have
participated in this experiment during an eight week period. Statistics of the datasets are given in Table 2.
Table 2. Dataset Statistics
Poem Class 1 Class 2
No. of users 24 24
No. of tags 29 37
No. of Categories 4 6
These two questionnaires are originally developed by Hwang et al. (2010) and are modified to evaluate the attitudes
of teachers and students towards the proposed system. The questionnaire for teachers includes twelve questions and
the questionnaire for students includes twenty-six questions. The data collected from the questionnaire are measured
using a five-point Likert scale that ranges from, strongly disagree (1-point) to strongly agree (5-point). These
questions can be classified into four dimensions: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, learning satisfaction
and willingness for future use (Davis, 1989). The researchers utilized Cronbach’s alpha analysis to evaluate the
internal consistency of each dimension of this questionnaire. The Cronbach alpha values in four dimensions are
higher than 0.70. This implies the reliability of the questionnaires is sufficiently high (Wortzel, 1979). During this
questionnaire design process, the questions were verified and validated by domain experts (five professors). Some
ambiguous or unsuitable questions were modified, removed, altered, or arranged in a proper order. The design of the
questionnaires highly relates to the two research questions. The questionnaire for teachers corresponds to the former
question; the questionnaire for students corresponds to the latter question.
The questionnaire for students was pilot tested with 24 students different from the 48 subjects. Completed scales
were received from all participants. These students are asked to mark any problems on the questionnaire, such as
misleading worded questions, improper order of questions, improper negations of questions, or if it takes excessive
time to finish this survey. Data were then analyzed using SPSS to assess the reliability and validity of the
questionnaire. The questionnaire is revised according to participants’ feedback before using it in the study.
For the course of “Watching Fish” twenty-nine distinct tags were generated. These tags were then analyzed by
experts and categorized into four categories: cherishing animals (10 tags), education (3 tags), recreation (14 tags) and
others (2 tags). After checking the system log, we found that more than half of the students (15/24) tended to reuse
and refine extant tags to generate their own tags. These tags mainly fall into two categories: cherishing animals (10
tags) and recreation (14 tags). This might mean the two categories represent the consensus of students about this
poem. This is to say, they have the common impressions of cherishing animals and recreation for this poem.
We have conducted semi-structured interviews to provide deeper insight into participants' views in the study. We
have interviewed all of the students in the experiment group and teachers to acquire detailed feedback.
The feedback from high achievement students shows their interests in the proposed learning activities. One of
the students said, “It is interesting to use a smart phone to learn in an authentic environment.” Another student
said, “Using photos to annotate poems is cool.” Still another student said, “It is exciting to create a new tag
which has not been posted by other students.”
The feedback from low achievement students shows their learning motivation has been elevated. One of the
students said, “It is helpful for me to browse annotations made by others.” Another student said, “With the aid of
learning guidance, I realized how to use tags to express personal feelings.”
The feedback from teachers shows the proposed approach can assist students to appreciate the poem. One of the
teachers said, “Everyone may have dissimilar feelings toward the same poem. Through the proposed approach,
students can share their tags.” Another teacher said, “Through the activity of annotation sharing, students can
learn other students’ experiences regarding the poem.”
In the first evaluation, a survey concerning the u-learning system performance, nine elementary school teachers who
had experience teaching Chinese poetry courses were asked to fill in a questionnaire about the system functionalities
and interface designs (as shown in Table 3). Note that this survey focused mainly on the use of smart phones, not on
the folksonomy creation algorithm. These nine teachers have between six and nine years experience of working in
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