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

flow: poem recommendation, sensory experience, action experience and reflection tagging. The third stage “action
experience” is designed according to Dewey’s “learning by doing” theory (Dewey, 1938) which emphasizes the
effect of action while learning. Based on Wood et al.’s (1976) definition of scaffolding and Vygotsky’s (1978) model
of instruction, the proposed four-stage learning guidance mechanism can be seen as assistance from more
knowledgeable peers and teachers that enables children to achieve what is beyond their capability to complete by
themselves. Therefore, teachers can help learners to appreciate Chinese poems within their zones of proximal
development (Vygotsky, 1978). Situated learning emphasizes the value of acquiring knowledge in both social and
situational contexts (Brown et al., 1989). Based on situated learning theory (Billett, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991;
Young, 1993), we propose to learn Chinese poems outdoors with the help of the proposed u-learning guidance
mechanism.
The weakness or limitation of the proposed system is the granularity of context information. Since this work adopts
“coarse-grained” context information (GPS information), instead of “fine-grained” context information (RFID
information), the proposed system cannot acquire real-time interaction from environments. However, using GPS
information results in easy deployment and application of u-learning environments compared with previous ulearning
studies.
Conclusions
Chinese scenic poems describe scenery in high-level ancient Chinese, which is difficult for children to understand by
vocabulary explanation and recitation. Context-aware ubiquitous learning outdoors, which combines real-world and
cyber-world resources, is a promising way for children to learn Chinese scenic poetry by experiencing real scenery.
However, most existing ubiquitous learning systems are based on experts’ efforts to construct the knowledge and
content for learning guidance. Our idea is to propose a folksonomy-based approach which can accumulate the
knowledge about poems and their corresponding scenic spots. A user can use a “Tagging” operation by a smart
phone to associate a concept (a word, a phrase or a sentence) with a scenic spot. These associations will be
automatically integrated into a folksonomy to support a u-learning system. To show the effectiveness of the
innovative approach, a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment was implemented for the “Chinese poetry”
unit of a fifth-grade Chinese language course in Taiwan, and forty-eight students participated in the learning activity.
From the surveys and interviews that were conducted to understand the functionalities of the system and the learning
effectiveness for the students, the results show that the system had a positive impact on students’ learning, especially
on the affective domain, including participation, motivation and interaction.
From the survey and interviews with the teachers who experienced the innovative learning environment, we saw that
this environment was highly accepted by most of the teachers. They agreed that, with the folksonomy-based
scaffolding in the outdoor learning environment, students can better learn about experiences related to the poems;
therefore, it was suggested that more learning activities for other courses that aim to enhance students’ ability and
desire to think about the subject matter can be conducted in this test field. In addition, we observed that the
folksonomy-based guidance mechanism integrated in the course seems to be effective in enhancing students’
learning motivation, especially with new tools and innovative teaching methods. The statistical data show that, no
matter whether students have used a smart phone before or not, they think using one to learn is not only interesting,
but also helpful. The students also indicated that their learning motivation is high thanks to the use of smart phones,
including their convenience and ease of use, and guidance with the folksonomy-based scaffolding. Therefore, it is
worth conducting long-term and large-scale experiments in the future to observe the learning effectiveness of such an
innovative approach.
Acknowledgements
This research was partially supported by National Science Council of Republic of China under the number of
NSC97-2511-S-468-004-MY3, NSC98-2511-S-468-004-MY3, NSC98-2511-S-468-002, NSC99-2511-S-468-003
and NSC99-2221-E-009-130-MY2.
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