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

Chinese poetry instruction, unlike natural science instruction, is not structural and procedural. The value of its
knowledge is not to request students to memorize standard answers. Instead, the instruction of Chinese poetry
emphasizes thinking and feeling. Therefore, students need in-time guidance to transform experiences into
knowledge. The aims of the research have been stated as the following research questions:
(1) What are students’ attitudes toward the use of this system?
(2) What are teachers’ attitudes toward the use of this system?
(3) What is the effectiveness of the folksonomy-based guidance mechanism?
To show the effectiveness of the innovative approach a ubiquitous learning system was implemented to conduct
Chinese scenic poetry appreciation activities in a fifth-grade Chinese course in Taiwan; forty-eight students
participated in the learning activity. The results from the surveys and interviews that were conducted to understand
the functionalities of the system and the learning effectiveness for the students show that the system had a positive
impact on students’ learning, especially on the affective domain including participation, motivation and interaction.
Based on the aforementioned idea a prototype has been implemented and surveys and interviews have been
conducted. The results show that this proposed approach had a positive impact on students’ learning, especially on
the affective domain including participation, motivation and interaction in Chinese poetry learning.
Preliminaries and Related Work
In this section, we review background knowledge about u-learning applications and Chinese poetry learning. Related
research about this work is surveyed.
U-Learning Applications
The rise of u-learning results from the convergence of e-learning and ubiquitous computing (Lee, 2008; Ley, 2007).
However, this topic is too new to have a widely accepted definition. Ogata et al. (Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002; Ogata &
Yano, 2004) compare four learning environments according to two attributes: level of embeddedness and level of
mobility. In their framework u-learning is characterized by high level of embeddedness and high level of mobility. A
very broad-sense definition of ubiquitous learning is “anywhere and anytime learning”, no matter whether wireless
communications or mobile devices are employed or not (Hwang, Tsai et al., 2008). According to many researches
from this field (Hwang, Tsai et al., 2008; Ley, 2007; Lyytinen & Yoo, 2002; Ogata & Yano, 2004), ubiquitous
learning contains mobile learning, pervasive learning and context-aware ubiquitous learning. In Si et al. (2006), ulearning
applications were categorized as shown in Table 1, and a frame-based model was proposed to represent
context-aware applications.
Table 1. Categorization of u-learning applications
Application Type Example
Location-aware learning guidance Museum guide (Oppermann & Specht, 1999)
Tour guide (Abowd & Atkeson, 1997)
Conference assistant (Dey & Futakawa, 1999)
Correlation-aware collaborative learning Japanese teaching (Ogata & Yano, 2004; Yin et al., 2005)
Knowledge awareness map (El-Bishouty et al., 2006)
P2P content access (Li et al., 2006)
Task-aware supervised learning Requirement satisfied learning (Cheng & Han, 2006)
Previous researchers have shown the benefits of mobile learning, pervasive learning and context-aware ubiquitous
learning (Chiou et al., 2010; Hwang, Chu et al., 2010; Martín & Carro, 2009; Ogata & Yano, 2004; Pfeiffer et al.,
2009; Wong et al., 2010; Yang, 2006). Subject learning has become popular in ubiquitous learning including natural
science (Hwang, Chu et al., 2010; Pfeiffer et al., 2009; Yang, 2006), computer science (Martín & Carro, 2009) and
language learning (Wong et al., 2010). Based on Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1956), the cognitive domain can be
divided into six major levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Previous
research is mainly focused on the bottom level, knowledge. However, this work aims to train students to be creative
and imaginative and therefore extends the application of ubiquitous subject learning to the comprehension level.
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